


A Battle Joined

by Ashling



Series: Ripple Effects - Alternate Universe [2]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Angst, Drama, F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I really gave this one my all, Intentionally crafted as slow torture to the reader, Romance, Season/Series 02, Two timelines
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 19:08:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 52,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14599761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: "Your wife is gone, Tommy. Does it matter how?"A sprawling tale of family and deceit, love and regret, anchored by Esme and Tommy's complicated arranged marriage.





	1. should I?

**Author's Note:**

> _A/N: This is my best effort. I gave it everything I had._

 

 

 

** PART I. WHAT HAPPENED TO MRS. SHELBY?**

**THEN • 1921 • ESME**  

** NOW • 1923 • TOMMY **

**  
**

 

 

* * *

**NOW**

Last night, he dreamt of her again. Dark and ethereal before a field of mist, looking at him imperiously, as though she did not recognize him. With Birmingham at his back, he tried to explain something to her, something as vast and complex and vital as the city itself, but then he realized that his mouth hadn’t been moving. He had been saying nothing. He gathered all his strength and tried to speak, managing only one word.

“Esme.”

At this, she seemed to recognize him; her brown eyes lit and her lips pressed together as if she’d just thought of a dirty joke at his expense and couldn’t say it because they were in polite company. But a wind passed over them, and that expression melted away. In its place was the small and bitter smile she wore when she knew and resented that she was being seen. Her eyes were bleak and knowing. She took a step back.

“Don’t,” he tried to say, but then he was awake.

 

 **THEN**  

Esme woke up to a few scattered moans, soft sounds of panic. She stared up at the ceiling, invisible in the darkness as it was.

“Tommy!” _Thump_ went her fist on the headboard. “Tommy, wake up!” _Thump thump_.

The noises ceased. Presently, he shuffled into her room, looking as groggy as she felt, hair a mess, shirt open to a slice of collarbone, irritating twice over. “Couldn’t you knock on my door?”

“No. Couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed.” She flicked on her bedside lamp and looked him over, squinting as her eyes adjusted to the light. No amount of sleepy irritation could prevent her from remembering to check his hands. They were steady at his sides.

“Can you get the tea this time?” she said.

He shot her a look and headed for the stairs.

Esme settled back into her pillow. “Oh, yes, it’s very hard that you have to make the tea once. Me? I had to nurse you through two dozen broken bones. Where’s my credit?” She gave herself a good five more minutes before she finally ripped off the covers and lurched out of bed.

Downstairs, Tommy was already through his first cup of black tea and onto the next, while her own cup of lemon tea sat waiting for her on the table. As disgruntled as he was, he’d still put in the sugar, all three cubes of it.

After a few scorching, sweet sips, she felt somewhat human again. Awake, at any rate, and capable of adequate gentleness.

“What was it this time?” she said.

He shook his head. “Just tunnels, Esme.”

She knew better than to try coaxing anything further out of him. She finished her cup. “It’s drafty in here, isn’t it?”

“Finn.”

Right, he’d knocked out a window in the office playing ball. Well, she was cold. She headed to the back door and returned wearing his long black coat.

“Where’s yours?” he said.

“Hanging in the front. Longer walk.” She grasped the left lapel, lifted it a bit, and sniffed.

“What?”

“Smells like the stable, and I just remembered what I forgot.”

Tommy sighed. “Right.”

Esme went to retrieve a thick green glass bottle from under the sink as Tommy pulled his shirt over his head.

“Should’ve done it after dinner,” she said. “It’s better if the ointment has more time to set in, while you sleep. Before you wash it off in the morning.”

“I know how it works.”

She knew that he knew. It wasn’t words so much as sounds, as were some conversations between them in these dark drowsy alternative teatimes. Just nudging each other in the night with sound rather than touch: _still here, still here._

Though there was touch, too. Esme poured some of the thick yellowish ointment into his open palm and poured some into hers too. Presently, he was rubbing it into his chest and arms, and she was kneading it into his back, taking care to cover every square inch of skin, warm hands quick and sure in this old routine. God, that pungent smell. It had taken her a month to get used to having it in the house rather than in the stables, and even now that she was used to it, she still hated it. It smelled to her of old age.

The yellow kitchen light was doing its best to soften his scars, slanted from blades and starburst from bullets. None were pink now, and there wasn’t a single bandage.

“Give it another few days, and I think we can stop,” she said. “You look alright, and you’ve been moving well enough.”

“You’ve been watching me move?” Even with his back to her, she could hear the slight smile in his voice at his own jab.

She rolled her eyes. If he could tease, he was fine. “I’m a nurse, Tommy.”

“Give it another week,” he said. “It still aches.”

“Alright.”

The Italians had more or less broken everything breakable in him; it was a wonder to her that he hadn’t simply died on the spot from the pain. She dreamed far less than he did, but the sound of him on that night followed her into her dreams when she had them: the fast breaths that hurt every fractured rib no matter how shallow they were, the endlessness of it, the sense that pooling under his skin along with the blood from internal injuries was a deep well of panic. It had put panic in her, too; if he couldn’t protect himself, she knew she couldn’t protect him.

“Something on your mind?” Tommy said.

Esme realized that she’d paused, left hand on his shoulder, right hand on the bottle.

“No.” She resumed her work.

He was almost done now, finishing with his left arm. “What about at dinner? You were almost quiet.”

She considered denying that, too.

“Don’t,” he said.

Esme surrendered; there was no use in pretending. “It’s not much. Arthur mentioned that you’d met some kind of horse trainer?”

“Lady Carleton.”

“A very friendly woman.”

Tommy sighed and tried to rub his face, the way he always did when he was desperately tired and trying to form words. Esme caught his wrist before he could end up accidentally smearing his nose.

“Our Arthur’s not one for subtlety, is he,” said Tommy.

“He has other strengths.”

“She's a woman who's read too many newspaper stories, Esme. That's all.”

“Seems that she hasn't read enough newspaper stories, but that's no concern of mine.”

“What's your concern?”

“It's an absence of concern.”

He twisted round in his chair to have a full conversation with eye contact and fucking everything, and she was mostly angry at herself for bringing it to this. For being indecisive about having the conversation even as she was having the conversation.

She knew he was visiting brothels, had expected it; after all, it had been nearly a year since they’d spat and shook on a deal, her deal, that had included never fucking each other. And he was a man unused to complete self-denial.

But Esme's instincts told her that Lady Carleton may well be a different matter. If Esme was wrong, and he didn’t take his wife into account at all when considering other women, then she’d overestimated her position by even broaching the subject, and that would be fucking embarrassing.

In any case, the split second of his assessment was excruciating.

“You want me,” he said slowly, “to know that you have an absence of concern about Lady Carleton.”

“I think she could be helpful. She’s a noblewoman, probably has connections in the racing world. She could help you get licenses.”

“I have connections in the racing world.”

“You have connections in the world of veterinarians that get paid in cash, and connections in the world of the men that muck out stalls. She has connections in the world of all the people wearing white linen and fashionable hats, drinking champagne as the horses go by.”

Tommy blinked. Damn him, he’d managed to compose his sleepy face while his back was turned, and now his guard was up and she couldn’t read a thing. Had this been any other subject (brothers, horses, babies, injuries, tactics, even), she would have had at least an inkling. But with this? Not the faintest.

He reached over into the pocket of his coat, the coat she was wearing, and produced a pack of cigarettes. Wordlessly, he offered her one, and she declined, as they both knew she would. He smoked away in silence for a moment.

Goddamn him, truly. Why did she have to endure a fucking smoke standoff in her own home? The silence was engineered to make her doubt herself—or no, that was not quite fair. That was the most malicious reading. Perhaps he only needed time to think.

But she was doubting herself. The instinct had come from nowhere in particular, just the general sense that perhaps, because their deal had not spelled out anything about others, he’d like a clarification. On one hand, he liked breaking all implicit rules, but on the other hand, there was no telling where fragments of some odd old pre-war chivalry remained; sometimes she saw a bit of it here and there, the senseless flotsam floating home from the wreck that France had made of that young Tommy she’d never know. As much as he was a man like any other man, there was a possibility that some scruples remained.

“So,” he said, finally, “you have no objections to a friendly working relationship between Lady Carleton and I.”

Now was the time to be perfectly clear. “I have no objections to friendliness between you, working or otherwise.”

He looked down at his own hand, at the cigarette between his fingers, maybe. At the smoke. And that wasn’t what she’d expected at all, it was something far worse.

She knew him. God, she knew him, and yet it was never enough. Why was he hurt?

If she knew anything of her husband, it was his pain: not only the shallow breaths after his worst beating but also the sharp inhale when she peeled away a bandage stuck to his skin, the full week of almost perfect silence that had accompanied Grace’s wedding announcement, and this. This small movement in his throat. She caught it as automatically as breathing.

He was still staring at his own hand when he said, “Are you unhappy, Esme?”

“Clearly not. I’m giving you my blessing.”

“Forget May Carleton. Are you unhappy here?” Now there was tension in his jaw, too, and fuck him for this. Anger was always the first thing she turned to, and it came easy this time, came with the injustice of him managing to be hurt by a punch she’d never thrown, when she’d taken such care to make sure that neither of them ever hurt the other.

“No,” she said, firmly.

His eyes snapped up to her face, and the nakedness of it was frightening; he studied her so closely, so carefully, and didn’t bother hiding it behind some screen of smoke or some coolly distant gaze.

“What do you want from me, Thomas?” She didn’t want to be saying those words even as she was saying them; they were the wrong ones, and the anger was wrong, but it was what she had, what she knew.

“There are reasons to think you’re unhappy,” he said. His cigarette was spent; he set it down in the ashtray. Didn't throw it; set it down. His voice took on that quality, too, of _I’m the adult in the room,_ which she hated. “You were raised on the road, but you are now in Birmingham, and the shop can’t spare you often enough to see the country much; you opposed the London expansion and yet we went; you have a claim to Campbell’s head and yet we’re almost working for him; you’re here for the rest of your life without some intervening catastrophe—”

Ah.

She cut in: “I’m not unhappy, Thomas.” She held his gaze, used the bare silence for emphasis. “And I am certainly not divorcing you.”

“Why not?” Oh, and now he was flippant? No, his face didn’t quite match that. His jaw was still tight. Maybe it wasn’t flippancy at all.

“When I say you can fuck May Carleton, it’s not some long game to play the adultery card in the courts and leave you.” 

He leaned back in his chair. “So _fucking_ is what you meant by 'friendliness'. I see now.” A slow smile spread across his face, the kind of beauty that could still still make her chest ache. Bastard. She hated that it still caught her unexpected sometimes. She should have been prepared; she knew she was tired. But it happened all the same.

“Oh, fuck off," she said. "Do you know how many men would jump for joy to have their wives allow them affairs? And you assume it's the excuse for a divorce, right away. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

But she realized that he was relieved. And that was something, wasn’t it? It was selfish and it was brutal and it had all the grace of a dogfight, but she was glad. She was glad he’d misunderstood, so she knew she could hurt him. Not bruise the ego, not divide the family, not inconvenience the plans, not damage the reputation, but hurt _him._

Good, she thought. Good.

“That’s not how I’d leave you, anyways,” Esme said, like they were just friends at the races, talking about the big houses they’d buy when their horses came in. That kind of speculative.

Tommy took out another cigarette, comfortable again now. He was smiling faintly still, but she could take it. “How would you do it?” he said.

 

**NOW**

“No,” Lucy said the very moment that she let herself into the offices, newspaper and mail in one hand, purse in the other. She didn’t look up, and didn’t need to. Tommy was standing at the front desk, where he always was.

“Are you sure?”

“There were no telegrams for you or for any other Shelby. I checked personally with both mailmen.” He studied her face as she hung up her coat, and was disappointed for the hundred-and-third time to find that she was not lying.

“There’s still that tea Polly says will put you right to sleep,” Lucy said, and wasn’t that something? It had become obvious to even his least canny employee, a mere twenty-four-year-old secretary, that he hadn’t properly slept for days.

“It tastes like shite and doesn’t work,” he said. That was half a lie; it tasted like shite and worked far too well. Fuck, why was he trying to justify himself to her? She had moved on already to sorting through the day's mail. He retreated his office, closing the door behind him and then reaching for the phone.

“Ada?”

“Tommy, look. I told you that if I heard from her, I’d call. And I will. Now I’m going to go. It’s not a good time.”

He would have pressed the point, but there was something in her voice that gave him pause. “What’s so bad about the time?”

“Freddie’s in hospital.”

He started out of his chair. “Who—”

“It’s not—Jesus, Tommy, not everything is a fucking war between men. He’s got the Spanish flu. I have to go. I’m late to negotiate with the landlord.”

“Wait, Ada.”

“What?” Fuck, he could just picture her, lips pursed and all.

He rubbed his face with one hand. He knew it was going to go badly even as he said it. “Let me help.”

“Help?” There was a smile in her voice, red lips, white teeth showing, nothing friendly. “You’re going to help us now? That’s very fucking generous.”

“Just—I can give you a little for the hospital bills, if he needs any—”

“It’s always about fucking money with you.”

But that was more weary than angry, and he saw an opening. He gripped the phone tighter, tried to sound like a reasonable man would sound. “Ada. Think about Karl, eh? Think about—”

“Shut your _fucking_ mouth, Tommy Shelby.” Fuck, he’d miscalculated badly. “If I hear my son’s name from you again, I will—” Faintly, he could hear some kind of background sound, wavering. “Karl? Sweetie, it’s alright. Come here. It’s alright. I promise. Here. Here. You want to play? Hold that. There you go. Now tell Tommy to fuck off.”

“Who that?” said a little voice.

“He’s your uncle.” Ada sniffed, and it was stupid, the way he could still remember her wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve when they were younger, the way Polly had scolded her for a thousand times. His head was in his hands, the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder.

“Ada,” he said. Again he knew they were the wrong words, and yet it was like he was a third person, watching himself say it. “It would only be a temporary loan.”

“Tell your uncle to fuck off.”

“Fa cough,” said the little voice obligingly, and then the line went dead.

 

**THEN**

“We’re not open for—” Esme’s eyes narrowed slightly. Small woman, massive car. “What’s your name?”

“May Carleton.” Yes, that had to be her; besides the dark-eyed, delicate-featured beauty, she also possessed vowels dripping in centuries’ worth of accumulated wealth.

“You’re here to see Tommy, then.”

“Yes.” 

“Come in, then, before you give them any ideas.” Esme stood aside as May went into the betting shop, then locked the door behind her.

May looked around unabashedly at the place in all its faintly dusty, mostly wooden plainness. “Them?”

“The men are always in a hurry before work.” Esme inspected May the way that May was inspecting the shop, until May looked her in the eye. “Odd that he gave you this address.”

“He said it was a gambling den. I told him that I've wanted to see one since I'm always reading about them in the papers. Quite the big scandal in the Telegraph lately. Anyway, he said that I could come and have a look.”

“Look away. It’s good that you’re so fond of the papers, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet you.”

“Yes, what is your name?”

Esme offered her hand, and waited until she and May were shaking hands before she replied. “Esme Shelby. I’m Tommy’s wife.”

To May’s credit, those big brown eyes didn’t so much as widen. “Oh,” she said, as disinterestedly as only a lady could. “A pleasure.”

“I’m sure.” Esme held that gaze for a moment, felt steel against steel, before cracking into a smile. “It’s all right.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You like horses, Ms. Carleton?”

“Yes, of course. You?”

“Born riding. So now that’s two things we have in common.”

“What’s the first?”

The front door opened, and John thundered in, still looking behind him through the door in amazement. “There’s a fucking great Riley parked out there and nobody’s watching it.”

“You’d better make sure it isn’t stolen, then,” said Esme, without looking up.

“Thinking of taking it for a ride myself, actually.”

“John.”

“Oh.” He bridled at the sight of May. It was comical, the way he looked back and forth between the two women, for all the world as guilty as if he’d been caught at something.

“Hello again,” said May. It was the very faint dryness of those two words that sold Esme on her entirely. The woman had, atop one of the finest stables in England, enough self-awareness to constitute an actual sense of humor. Esme couldn't help but like her.

“The car, John,” said Esme.

He stared at her, quite transparently trying to ascertain if a murder was about to take place on company property, and if so, if he was supposed to prevent it or help with it.

Esme laid it on a little more thickly, one eyebrow raised. “If you don’t mind.”

With a faint huff, he shot her a look that said as clearly as anything: _I wash my hands of this._

“And tell Tommy to wait a minute if you see him coming in,” she called after him. The door shut. She turned back to May. “Tea? The kettle’s already been on.”

“Oh, no, I’m alright.”

“Earl Grey? Lemon? Green? Oolong? Are you sure?” Esme said it quite fast and bright, like a bustling shopgirl.

“Earl Grey, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Not at all.” Esme disappeared into the kitchen, then poked her head out. “Come in.”

“Oh.” May followed her in, sitting at the little wooden table when Esme gestured at it.

“I know it’s not glamorous,” said Esme. “But then, gambling’s mostly math. I imagine the newspapers aren’t quite as interested in that as they are in the blood or the money. But we keep the blood away from the customers, and the money locked up. Sorry to disappoint.”

“Oh, I came to see the horse. The shop was quite—quite a side concern.”

“Oh, good. Then you won’t be disappointed at all.” Esme passed over a cup, and sat down beside May. “The horse is good, I think. She’s a little young, but sound. I used to race when I was younger, you know. Not in a ring, out on the grass. At the fair.”

“That sounds lovely.”

“It was. I like to think I’d still be out there, riding, if I hadn’t gotten married. If they hadn’t married me off.” She considered May. “Do your people still marry women off? I know they wouldn’t on paper, but of course there are certain considerations.”

“I wouldn’t know. I got lucky with Ian.”

“What a shame we can’t all be lucky.”

In the silence that followed, the muffled sound of some conversation outside intruded. Even through the heavy door, Esme could tell by the timbre and pace of it that it was John and Tommy, going back and forth. Time to speed up.

“Do you consider yourself unlucky?” May said. “You look happy here.”

“I am. It’s gets easier, with some things. That’s why I’m glad you’re here,” Esme went on. “I’m glad Tommy’s making friends.” Clumsy, wince-inducing almost, but it did the job.

“I’m sure he has many friends.”

“War mates, yes. Family, yes. But a man needs certain things that they cannot provide.” (This was, of course, not counting the whores. But then, Esme knew enough about ladies to know that you were not supposed to bring that up with them. So she didn’t.)

May’s exquisite mask of a face remained admirably intact. “Does he?”

“He does.” The front door opened, but Esme didn’t mind it. If May hadn’t gotten the picture at least three or four times over by then, she deserved an empty bed.

“Kitchen,” Esme called.

Tommy arrived, looking mildly harried. “Sorry I’m late. There was a family matter.”

“It’s no trouble; we were getting acquainted. You know how I like to talk horses.” Esme rose from her chair and set about washing her cup, talking all the while. “I need to finish writing out the odds. There’s roast in the icebox. I’ll be at Polly’s tonight; it’s Lizzie’s time off from the kids, and all of us are crawling into bottles for a shout.”

With that, Esme paused in the doorway, looked him in the eye, and sold it.

“You two have a good day,” she said.

 

**NOW**

Tommy’s gun jammed.

The man he’d been aiming at froze, looking surprised, then gratified. Then he fell over with a heavy crash, because Tommy was too goddamn tired to be surprised at things like firearm failures and had thrown a massive wooden shipping crate at his head.

Pain ripped through his right shoulder, and he threw himself flat on the ground, just in time to see Arthur take out the shooter with a shot to the head. Scrambling forward, Tommy wrested the crate off the fallen man and—

A rough hand landed on his shoulder. He grabbed it and twisted hard, turning to face—

“Tommy, he’s dead,” Arthur said.

Tommy glanced back at the man on the ground, and found it to be true. A disappointment. Breathing heavily, he let his surroundings filter back in; not so many shots now, mostly men panting, standing around. The fight over. He let go of Arthur’s hand.

“There’s kicking a man when he’s down, and then there’s kicking a man when he’s dead,” Arthur said, by way of explanation, jovial as he always was after a fight, but with a thin current of unease running beneath. Tommy hated that, the way that Arthur had second thoughts now instead of the old pure animal instincts. 

That said, Arthur wasn’t wrong, and Tommy was too exhausted engineer a fight that would give his annoyance an outlet.

“Petrol,” he said instead.

“Right, yeah.” Arthur, despite the Great Jesus Conversion or whatever-it-was, still quite enjoyed a big fire, and it couldn’t get much bigger than burning up the very warehouse they’d fought in. He all but skipped away to fetch the jugs from the car as Tommy walked well away from the building. He helped himself to a cigarette, squinting under the rare blue sky.

Presently, John ambled up beside him, with one of those massive cigars already out. “You’re bleeding.”

Tommy checked. He was, in fact, from the shoulder. “It’s a scratch.” But after a bit of a look from John, he dug into the kit in the backseat of the car, shucked off his coat, and set about a makeshift bandage.

“I dunno, mate,” John said, after a minute. “If this is the great Chinese uprising we were all supposed to be scared of, I’d say your man on the inside was smoking something stronger than this.”

“Mm.”

“Does he usually exaggerate?”

Tommy tried to rouse himself, to focus. “No. And most of his reward was contingent on our success. There wasn’t the incentive.”

“Guess he miscalculated, then.”

Tommy had finished up with his bandages, and put back on his coat. He was well into his second cigarette when he heard John saying his name for the second time.

“Mm?”

John looked like he was so used to fathering now that he was going to try his hand at fathering Tommy. Jesus. John was not old enough for this, and Tommy was not drunk enough.

“Arthur had to tell you it was enough," John said. " _Arthur_.”

Tommy rubbed his face. It was true. Arthur, he of the endlessly bloody hands, who’d probably broken more bones in his time than other man alive, had told Tommy to calm down. A most unwelcome role reversal.

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “Yeah, well, he tried to get me to go to some fucking Bible study, that’s where he is right now. And he’s sober.”

“And you’re not?”

Tommy shot him a dull-eyed glare.

John put his hands up. “Look, I don’t know how to do this shit, but it looks like Polly’s abandoned post and Arthur’s busy filling empty bottles with Bible verses, so I’m the only—”

“I’m going to London.” Tommy threw down his cigarette.

“What, now?”

“Yes.” Tommy checked his pocket watch; there was just enough time for the four-thirty train, if he rushed. He headed for his car.

“What am I supposed to tell Arthur?” John called after him.

“Doesn’t matter,” Tommy shouted back. “He can’t hear you with his head that far up his ass.”

The warehouse flared into a gorgeous orange mass of flame as he drove away.

 

**THEN**

Lizzie's night off was going rather well, considering that Ada had been stuck at home with Karl and the croup and that Polly had been tipsy even before Esme arrived.

“So Michael’s going to stay?” Esme said, settling in with a full glass.

Polly nodded. That smile, brilliant and complete, was all her, and none of the whiskey. Just a shining happiness that Esme had never seen in her before, and she was fucking amazed at it. Polly seemed to be even surprising herself; there was a slight self-awareness about her, as if to say: _I know, I know, but he’s my son._

“Tommy spat on it,” she said.

“Good,” said Esme. “We could use all that training; sometimes I think I’ll have to go back to school, the way the business is growing.”

“Back? Did you ever go in the first place?” And there she was. There was Polly.

Esme bit down on a grin and studiously did not roll her eyes. “We weren’t always on the road.”

“I could help,” Lizzie offered. I’ve studied some to be a secretary.”

Polly opened her mouth, but Esme, seeing the glint in her eye, cut in. “You’ve two four-month-olds, and four children besides; it’s a wonder you’re still on your feet. Adding accounts on top of that would be like working twelve hours at the Longbridge car plant and then turning round and working twelve at the prison night watch. You’d be dead within the week. Anyways, Michael’s got it handled.”

A flash of recognition went across Lizzie’s face. “Of course,” she said, to which Polly’s eyes narrowed in a small display of annoyance.

Esme watched it all with suppressed amusement. This was just how things were; the two nieces-in-law were never quite sharp enough to escape Polly, but often had a light enough touch to partially save each other from her most stinging salvos. And at the end of the day, there was a quite familial familiarity in that, wasn’t there?

“To Michael,” Lizzie went on. “May the books flourish under his pen.”

Esme raised her glass. “To Michael.”

“To Michael.” Polly drank, and Esme drank, and Lizzie tipped back her head and drank every last drop in her not inconsiderable glass.

Polly and Esme looked at her.

“Twins,” Lizzie said. With feeling.

Esme took the bottle and refilled her glass.

“Still having trouble sleeping?” she asked.

Lizzie nodded. "The house is a fucking disaster, the twins always set each other off, and John's gone more than ever now, managing London. Also, sometimes I worry all the children will die in a house fire."

"That's specific," said Polly.

"The babies don't wake them up anymore. And they scream. So you'd have to assume that if I was screaming at them to get up, they might not hear."

"Bit dangerous," Esme conceded. Lizzie drank harder. Right. "Any good news?"

"Well, Katie's finally taken to me. Or is taking pity on me. I can't tell which is which, but she's helping with the twins, for which I'm eternally grateful. You know, when I married John, I was worried about keeping his interest, but that was a waste of time. He's easy. It's the kids that I have to run after." Lizzie seemed to have something else just on the tip of her tongue, but then she sank into a contemplative silence.

"Oh!" she said, after a minute. "Speaking of."

"Speaking of what?" said Esme.

Lizzie waved her hand. "Husbands. John said you took care of some business today." She shot Esme a meaningful but unintelligible look. 

“What?”

"This morning, at the shop. Some woman running after Tommy."

“Oh, fuck. Lady Carleton? It’s fine. We had a talk.”

“Lady?” said Polly.

“Is it _really_ fine?” Lizzie said, a little too loudly.

“A Roma. And a lady.” Polly spluttered with laughter.

Esme shot Lizzie a quick look: _how much did she have before I arrived?_ But Lizzie was too far gone herself to catch it.

“Not much of a match,” Polly was saying. “I bet Lucy is still scrubbing bits of her out of the floorboards.”

Assuming that Esme would decisively beat an aristocratic woman was perhaps the closest thing to a compliment Polly had ever given her. Esme almost felt bad contradicting her. “There was no fight. I gave her the go-ahead.”

“You what?” said Polly.

"Haven't fucked him yet, have you," said Lizzie.

Esme wished she'd had more to drink; then she'd have something to blame her speechlessness on. It was stomach-wrenching for her talk about this, but Lizzie and Polly were both too drunk to be dangerous, right?

"It's been a year," Esme finally managed to say. "I thought it was time."

Polly laughed incredulously and had herself another long sip, but Lizzie was nodding. "I've had widowers as regular customers before. I don't think they ever end up with the first woman that comes after. The third or fourth, maybe. Not the first."

"Maybe you were too good at your job," said Polly. 

Lizzie's eyes narrowed. It was impossible to pierce Polly's poker face. 

"Slow and give it time, yeah," said Lizzie. "But after that, will you try?"

"I don't know if I can," Esme said, quietly. 

"Mm?" Lizzie didn't hear, but Esme didn't repeat herself.

"This is ridiculous," Polly declared. "When did we forget the family motto?"

"Don't fuck with the Peaky Blinders?" said Esme. "Yeah, but this isn't business."

“Bedroom, battlefield...what’s the difference?” Polly pointed at her. "You should take what you want."

"Should I?" said Esme, as if she knew what she wanted, or how to get it. As if any of this were even remotely a possibility.

Just then, the front door opened, and John burst in, smelling of whiskey and smoke and bringing fresh air in with him. 

“John!” Lizzie beamed. With surprising dexterity, she reached out, grabbed him by the collar, and yanked him down for a big, satisfied kiss. He made a sound of surprise against her lips, and glanced nervously over at Polly, but Polly just raised her half-full glass good-humoredly.

“So you’ve had a good night,” he said, when Lizzie finally broke for air.

“Mm-hmm.” Lizzie smiled beatifically up at him. Then frowned. “What happened to your face? Did somebody? I will—” Lizzie shot to her feet, then wobbled slightly.

“I don't think you will, whatever it is,” John said, trying and failing to keep a straight face. Lizzie’s nose was slightly scrunched up, which lent an air of adorableness to an expression otherwise composed of wifely possessiveness and mulish determination.

“I will,” Lizzie said firmly. “And you just tell me, and I will. And then...”

Polly raised her eyebrows. Esme (not drunk enough for this) chugged the rest of her glass.

“...I _will_.” Lizzie punctuated this deeply heartfelt threat with a small burp, startling herself and sending Polly off into peals of laughter.

“Right. We're going home now." John put an arm round his wife's shoulders and guided her towards the front door, then sat her down and helped her put her shoes on. 

"What was it, John?" Polly called.

"Scrap at the Marquis. You should have seen Michael, he did himself proud."

"Michael?" Polly put her glass down so hard that for a second Esme feared it would break. "What was he thinking?"

"He's just a boy, Pol, having a night out like any other boy. Did well! Don't think he has even a black eye." Before Polly could interrogate him any further, he dragged his wife out the door, throwing one last “Goodnight!” over his shoulder.

When Esme looked over, Polly had gone to the phone and was dialing up a number. Esme let herself out.

 

**NOW**

Tommy walked straight from the door of the office to the safe, squatted, and began entering the combination. "I'm going to London."

Nothing.

"Polly?" He glanced over his shoulder, and there she was, yes, sat at her desk, wearing the same red dress from the day before, the bottle beside her not even half-hidden behind some stack of papers. Jesus. "I'm going to—"

"I heard you."

"The Chinese shouldn't be an issue. We broke up the meeting and burnt down the warehouse easily. John can tell you all about it. I don't know how long the trip is going to take, but I'll call you if it's more than three days."

Bag packed, he stood and walked directly in front of her desk. "Pol."

"I don't care, Tommy."

They stared each other down. Even at her lowest, Polly could still best him, steel on steel.

"Right," he said, giving it up. Halfway to the door, he remembered. "I'll call you when I get there, give you the name of the hotel. If you get a telegram, you can leave a message about it from the concierge."

"Your wife is gone, Tommy. Does it matter how?" He knew he should be grateful that there was at least this much fight left living in her, but it was hard to be grateful for that while she was cutting him up.

"I thought you didn't care," he said.

"I don't."

The temptation of bringing up Australia nearly overwhelmed him, but he gripped his bag white-knuckled and simply said, "It matters."

The roads outside were clogged and heavy with pedestrians. He broke half a dozen laws on his way to the train station, and was rewarded by making it three minutes before the train left. He cut the ticket line.

The girl running the booth moved painfully slowly. "You must be Mr. Shelby," she said, as she tore off his ticket. 

"Yes."

"What happened to Mrs. Shelby?"

Tommy could not cut a girl, especially not in the middle of a train station. "She died."

 _"That's not what I heard,"_ she said, Romani chib flawless. 

He snatched the ticket from her hand and shoved the money at her. _"Tell Dika to take her rumors and fuck off."_

As soon as he sat down, the train carriage emptied around him, its other occupants giving him a wide berth. It occurred to him that his coat was bloodstained and ripped at the shoulder, and he'd need to buy a new one in London. He slouched back against the seat and took out a fat envelope from his bag. From the envelope, he pulled out all the telegrams, yellow and wrinkled. He didn't need to look at them; he had them memorized, and they were easy to memorize. But he wanted to look.

October 2, 1921. ALIVE.

January 1, 1922. ALIVE.

April 6, 1922. ALIVE.

July 5, 1922. ALIVE.

January 9, 1923. ALIVE.

April 3, 1923. ALIVE.

The whistle sounded twice. He tucked the telegrams into the inner pocket of his coat as the train began to move, carrying him into the unknown.


	2. I see

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THEN • Esme deals with the fallout from the arrests of Michael and Arthur, attempts to secure the future of her people, and navigates her fraught marriage.
> 
> NOW • Tommy continues to search for his wife, and finds some surprises along the way.

 

  

 

 

** PART I. WHAT HAPPENED TO MRS. SHELBY? (CONTINUED)**

**THEN • 1921 • ESME**  

** NOW • 1923 • TOMMY **

**  
**

  

 

**NOW**

It was a lovely neighborhood, and it looked even lovelier in the lingering glow of the sunset, with its wide, tree-lined avenues and its tall white houses, all white and green and gold, and all its beauty entirely lost on him. The only meaning he found in its comfortable, well-fed sprawl was small satisfaction that contented prosperity usually made for easy crime. Without even a curious look from one of the neighbors, he went through the backyard of the target house, picked the lock on the back door, and strolled into the kitchen.

“Maisie Wilkes, is it?” he said, and it would have been friendly were it not for the lockpick still in his hand, the door swinging open behind him in the evening breeze.

The woman standing at the stove looked at him and said nothing. She wasn’t what he’d been expecting, although in retrospect, what had he expected, a flapper? With that floral apron, that short, plump build, and those loose blonde curls, she looked more matronly than anything else.

“The phone’s too far to reach, the soup’s not hot enough to burn, and the knives aren’t made for cutting anything but fruit,” he said mildly. “Sit down.”

She didn’t move a muscle. Tommy sighed and reached into his jacket.

“Sit down,” he said, this time, gun in hand. Subtlety was meant for a man who had had more sleep and lost less blood than he.

For reasons beyond his understanding, she took off the apron, folded it neatly, and left it on the kitchen counter before she sat down at the table. Tommy sat down across from her.

“Who are you?” she said.

He took off his cap and set it down in the center of the table, between the two place settings, blade-lined brim pointed at her. It made no difference; her eyes were fixed on the gun. He sighed. Perhaps that was sensible. He put the gun down on the table too, closer at hand, with a distinct clack of metal on wood.

“You used to live with Rupa Lee,” he said, and quickly, “Don’t—” for Maisie had started forward in her chair with such fear and fury that he reached for the gun. They stared at each other over the odd assortment of weapons and cutlery on the table, and then there was a bubble, splash, and hiss as the soup began to boil over the rim of the pot on the stove.

After a moment, Tommy holstered his gun and got up to turn the heat down a little. When she thought he wasn’t looking, out of the corner of his eye, he caught her glancing at the clock. He lifted the wooden spoon and tasted the soup. “It could use some salt.”

“What do you want?”

“A phone number and an address.”

“If you think I’m handing Rupa over to you, you clearly know nothing.”

“You wouldn’t be handing her over to me. I don’t care about her. It’s her sister, Esme, I want to talk to.”

Her jaw tightened. Her eyes flicked to the cap on the table. _There it is._ “You’re the husband.”

“That I am.” He had to fight to keep his voice as calm and arrogant as before. To keep all shame out of it.

Maisie studied him a moment. “I don’t have her address.”

“Then I’ll take the phone number.”

Again, her eyes flicked to the clock, and back to him. Her jaw set. “You may think that the big house and the nice apron mean I’m weak, and I’m sure I couldn’t survive whatever hell you come from, but I absolutely won’t sell out a woman running from her husband. For any price.” She pushed her plate forward and to the side, sweeping the cap off the table and onto the floor. “Or any punishment.”

Tommy put the spoon down. “You’ll give me the phone number, and not because I’m threatening to kill you.” There were telegrams he could show for this, but he didn’t want to. He had shared them with no one and had no intention of starting now. “I’m only concerned about my wife’s safety. That’s all. No need for you to protect her.”

She smiled bitterly. “So you’re asking out of the goodness of your heart, and I’m telling out of the goodness of mine?”

Tommy suppressed a sigh. He knew he should have led with the gun; if he'd done that, he'd be out of the house by now. This is what they meant about old dogs and new tricks. Blood was so much easier. “Do you have the second sight, Ms. Wilkes?”

“What?”

“Can you see the future?”

“What do you mean?”

“The table is set for two, so I’d say you were expecting somebody, but it wasn’t me you were expecting, was it?” He pointed at her. “No second sight. And the deed of the house isn’t signed in your name, it’s signed to Alice Whitaker. From the food ready and the way you keep looking at the clock, I’d say you two usually have dinner at seven. And that’s five minutes away.”

From his pocket, he produced a pen and a slip of paper, which he placed on the table in front of her. “One telephone number is easy.”

Maisie looked at the pen, then back up at him. “I thought you people didn’t hurt women.”

Tommy shook his head. “The Italians say that sometimes, to make themselves feel better. But they don’t mean it.” His eyes were nearly gray, as if the color had leached out of them. “And I’m not Italian.”

She swallowed. Of course it always took time for people, especially women, to get over their scruples, but he knew the fear more than enough to know it would cut through. He gave it a few minutes, enough time for him to have a cigarette.

They didn’t have a few minutes. As he lit his cigarette, the sound of a car rattling to a stop in the street outside came clear through the front door.

“Punctual,” Tommy said.

One last defiance rose up in her. It looked oddly fierce on her rosebud of a face, but Tommy knew enough of the cadence of threats to recognize it as a last gasp. “If I scream, she’ll run.”

There was no more time for this, no more patience. He tossed the cigarette on the floor, and leaned over her, ice entire. “There have been many before you that have tried to stand between me and my wife. Most didn’t have have as much to lose as you do. You’ll be one of the easy ones.”

In the stillness of the house, the sound of a key turning in the lock of the front door was unmistakable. He picked up his cap, slowly, deliberately. “Just remember that you had choices, eh? It could’ve been easier.”

“Wait.” She snatched up the pen and scribbled down the number. “There, go.”

The front door opened. “Maisie,” a woman’s voice called, “You won’t believe the day I’ve had…”

Maisie said nothing. She had begun to cry.

Tommy inspected the paper. “If for any reason I can’t talk to her within the week,” he said quietly, “I will be back for seconds.”

“Fucking _go_.”

Tommy slipped out the back door and, seconds later, heard the woman say, “I thought you’d given up smoking again, love. What’s wrong?” There was a rustle, a thump, then the muffled sound of Maisie mumbling something. Into the woman’s neck, most likely. He remembered how it sounded, even after all this time. Intimacy had its own unmistakable hallmarks, no matter who it was between. Warm skin. He leaned against the hard brick of the back wall and couldn't stop listening.

“It’s all right, it’s all right. It’s all right. I’m here, everything is going to be all right,” the woman said, as Maisie began to cry, and then, “I have you. It’s all right now.” The way someone would say it that meant it. Someone that could say _I have you_ and mean it. Someone that could say _it’s all right_ and mean it. He stayed there for longer than he needed to, even after the voices disappeared away, down the hall.

A terrier loped out of the garden plot and launched itself at his trousers, pink tongue lolling out, furry head bumping against his shins. He scratched it behind its floppy ears. For a moment he was tempted to steal it. For a moment he was tempted to do violence to the pristinely verdant back garden. To take, to destroy—But the feeling passed, and presently he began to walk back towards the main road. Sunset would come soon, and there was still work to be done.

 

 

 

**THEN**

Esme had seen almost every member of the family at some desperate moment or another, but none were ever as fearsome in their fear as Polly. She held no weapon, and she didn't need to; the bone-stark absence of her customary elegance or distance or wit came as more startling and unsettling than threats would have. Strip everything away and Polly fought feral.

"I don't give a _fuck_ about whiskey," she snarled. "I don't give a fuck about Billy Kitchen. I want my son out of prison! _Now_."

"Tommy," Esme said, "I spoke to Johnny Dogs."

Polly turned on her, but she'd expected that. "This meeting should just be family."

"It is," said Esme, but Polly had already moved on.

"She's not blood, Tommy! Or is this a business? Have you forgotten?"

Oh, that again. _That again._

Tommy looked up. "Enough."

Esme caught his eyes and spoke quickly. "I spoke to Johnny Dogs. The Lees are kin."

"The bloody Lees!" Polly said.

"They can give us men."

Polly exploded. "We don't need more fucking men! It's _men_ that have done the damage. It is men fighting like cockerels that have put us here in the first place."

And there it was. Placing her alongside the men, alongside Tommy, bloodying her hands in the name of all she'd fought against from the very start, even if most of that had taken place between her and Tommy only in the dim light of a 2am lamp. Sometimes Esme wanted to take her ring off just so she could throw it at Polly's face. It was Michael, it was Michael, it wasn't personal, but because it stripped away all artifice and left behind the plain truths of how Polly saw her, and because those truths were as graceful as curdled milk, Esme could barely keep her voice level and low. She met Polly’s eyes over the top of Tommy’s head.

"From the very start,” Esme said, low and intent, “I said that London was nothing but smoke and trouble, but we're here now. _We are here now._ What would you have us do, take the Lewis gun to the remand wing?"

For a moment, Esme thought Polly might strike her. But then Polly's eyes hardened, and she gathered her dignity around her like a mink coat. "If Michael ever gets out of prison, I am taking him away from this family. For good. This life is bad." Her voice shook with conviction. "This life is all bad."

Esme swallowed. She was right, of course. Esme knew it and had always known it, but it was one thing to think it to herself in the dead of night and entirely another to see nearly every member of the family speechless in the face of it.

Thankfully, nobody had to reply; Polly was already heading for the door, hustling Finn out with her.

"Aunt Pol, what are you doing?"

"Shut up and walk."

John hung about uneasily, so Esme raised her eyebrows at him. _What?_

"Right." He took the hint and left.

Esme knew that empty stare on Tommy's face well; his mind was miles away again, in London perhaps, or only in Birmingham jail, but that was fine for her purposes.

"I'll go speak to Queen Mary Lee at the Black Patch. Johnny Dogs says she offered soldiers for a few nights."

"Alright."

"Do you need more?"

"Men or time?"

"Time. I may be able to get a week, two at most, but I'll need to negotiate."

"Alright."

After a moment, Esme reached over into his coat pocket and fished for the car keys. His hands closed around her wrist, though his eyes didn't move.

"I can drive to fucking Parrott Street," Esme said impatiently.

"Charlie will take you. Down the canals."

"I don't need—"

"Charlie and Scudboat, both armed.”

He looked at her impatiently, as if to say: _don’t you understand?_ Of course she did. She resisted rolling her eyes. She resisted kissing his forehead. How like this man to only allow himself a display of concern if it was sheathed in steel. She let go of the keys, and he let go of her.

 

 

 

**NOW**

It was as if Tommy had been paralyzed, as if the old woman’s voice was hypnotizing him. He sat in her wagon, slightly cramped, back hunching because of the odd tilt of the back wall, while Molly told him what appeared to be the entire family history of every goddamn family member he or she had ever had. He hadn’t slept at all since he’d gotten Rupa’s phone number; he’d tried calling it, with no luck, and he’d hunted down half a dozen other leads, but gained nothing for his efforts. As a result, a low ache had been building his head since early in the morning. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to interrupt Molly. He couldn’t demand information about Esme, not only because Molly’s wizened skin and grey hair demanded respect, but also because he was terrified that she, too, would have nothing to tell him, and then he’d have nothing at all to go on. The thought of a return trip to Birmingham with nothing but those fucking telegrams for company...

Molly unexpectedly spared him; after one last string of stories detailing the racing exploits of her grandson, she fixed him with her sharp eyes and said, “You’re a good boy, Tommy Shelby. I ought to thank you for indulging an old woman for so long in her reminiscences. Now. Why are you here?”

“When my wife left, she told me she was looking forward to speaking Romani chib again. And I have reason to believe that something has happened to her, about five or six months ago.”

“So you come to the biggest gossip in all of London? Tommy Shelby, asking for help. That’s very flattering.” She grinned one of those toothless grins that made it clear she was taking the piss out of him, and enjoying it mightily. “Well, you’re in luck. She lived among us for a long time before she disappeared. That was seven months ago.”

Fuck, was it really this easy? Tommy went still, like this sudden source was a horse that might spook, rather than a woman ready and eager to tell him everything. Then he caught himself, relaxed as best as he could again. If Molly noticed it, she had the grace not to show any indication or change her expression. She went on as merrily and naturally as spring water running downstream.

“She was working for a horse trader, Luther Atwell. Good man, a little odd, but he knows his work backwards and sideways. She was living with Elsie Waters before she went, helping with the baby. You know Elsie? Lovely girl. Best hair I’ve ever seen. Shame about her husband. Now come along.”

And just like that, she shuffled out of the wagon, and he followed, blinking in the early morning sunlight. “I’ll take you to Luther. You’d better start there.”

Just like that.

He could feel all eyes on him as they wove their way through the camp, and he fell into the usual guarded expression. Hard eyes were a good default while his mind ran ahead, spun everything out of almost nothing. He’d had nothing for so long that even these small pieces of information were spinning out whole wheels of memories in his mind: Esme astride her black mare, squinting against the setting sun; Esme pushing her hair out of her eyes as she laughed at one of Johnny Dogs’s jokes and they both watched the racehorses thunder by; Esme pacing the hall with a baby in each arm and arguing with Polly about birthing methods, as Lizzie snored on an armchair in the background; Esme whispering something in Karl’s ear that made his snub-nosed tiny face light up—

“Luther, this is Tommy Shelby. Tommy, Luther Atwell.”

Tommy blindly shook the massive hand offered to him, then squinted up at the man presented to him. Aside from taking in the obvious features (dark hair, scar on the right cheek, brown eyes) as always, Tommy looked for two things right away: whether Tommy could beat him in a fight and whether or not that was likely to happen. From Luther ’s height and broad shoulders, it looked like Luther had at least the build for a fight, even if his skills remained unknown. And there was so much tension there that the smile was clearly only perfunctory. This was not a man much accustomed to changing his expression for the accommodation or gratification of anyone else. So a possibility twice over: Tommy could lose that fight, and it might happen.

“You’re here about Esme, then,” Luther said. He spoke with a pronounced, exaggeratedly casual air, as if daring Tommy to take offense. “Bit late for that, aren’t you.”

Tommy slipped his hands into the pockets of his coat. He could feel the cool metal of the razor handle. Yes, he decided, as long as he was quick, the height and muscle wouldn’t be enough. The fight would be relatively easy, if it came.

“You know what?” Molly said, brightly. “I’ll go around, find Elsie, see who else you can talk to. Be good, boys.” And then she was off.

Luther looked Tommy over one more time, then ambled over and sat down on a log beside a dead fire pit. He lit a cigarette. “Seven months is a long stretch,” he said.

Fuck if Tommy was going to try to justify himself. Leave that to Polly and God, if she was still at it with those daily prayers. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. She was always independent. Never talked much about herself. Never talked about you. Never really talked.”

Now that didn’t sound right. “Did she argue?”

“No. Not with me. When she thought I was wrong, she’d just do it her way and then let me know after it was all over. But that wasn’t too often. I let her have her way with the horses plenty. She was good with the customers. Always knew how to talk up a horse, whether it was to a jockey or a toff.”

As Luther talked, Tommy lit his own cigarette.

“Aren’t you gonna sit?”

Tommy ignored that. “So one of your workers disappeared, and you have no idea why.”

“She asked for that Tuesday and Wednesday off. Said it was fine, slow going, we’d just made good sales that weekend. She’d managed to sell off a gray mare even though it was twenty years old. But it wasn’t unusual for her to go off somewhere for a day or two and not talk about it.”

“So after two years of working for you, you knew nearly nothing about her.” Tommy could see Luther’s jaw twitch at that, and gave him silence, but whatever reply Luther had been suppressing remained suppressed. So Tommy went on. “And when she disappeared, you what? Let it go?”

Luther blew a slow stream of smoke and insolence into the chilly air. “I asked around for her, of course. But she could’ve said something. Could’ve left a note.” He looked up at Tommy, no longer even making the effort of a false smile. “I figured it was better not to waste my time chasing a woman that didn’t want to be found.”

 

 

 

**THEN**

Five minutes into giving Lucy instructions about what to do in her absence, Esme heard the front door to the Watery Lane betting shop open.

“We're closed. Fuck off,” she called without looking up.

“Are you sure?” said a familiar, teasing voice.

“Ada!” Esme lurched out of her chair and all but ran to scoop her up in a hug. “You smell terrible,” she said into her shoulder.

“Stepped in something on the way. Almost got run over by a car.”

Esme pulled back and inspected Ada’s face. She looked thinner than ever, but other than that, as happy and spirited as always. “Where have you been? It’s been weeks!”

“I know, but Karl’s walking now. He’s basically a tornado. And Freddie’s—” Ada looked over Esme’s shoulder. Behind them, Lucy was writing out the odds for the next day on the blackboard, while Tommy sat at his desk, brooding. (Planning, if one was being charitable.)

“It’s alright, you don’t have to tell me,” Esme said. “Let’s just say that the Party approves of his work, right?”

“Right. We’re all doing well. Had to move to a different flat, farther away, so I thought I’d drop in and give you the news and the new address.” With another glance to Lucy, Ada fetched a piece of paper and wrote it down.

Esme lowered her voice. “Freddie’s doing _that_ well, is he?”

Ada shrugged and handed over the paper. “Politics and crime are quite alike. The better you do, the more they want you dead.”

“Sounds about right.”

Lucy made no notice of them whispering and ignoring her, sat twisting her long pale braid with her left hand, as she wrote very carefully with her right, undoubtedly sums she was terrified of getting wrong. Esme knew that look. Seeing it now made her feel a little pang of guilt. Perhaps she’d gone too hard on making sure the number were right.

“She is Lizzie’s cousin, you know,” Esme said. “And we checked her records up and down. She’s no Grace; she wouldn’t rat. She’s more accurate at the ledgers than Arthur. And she’s more fun to drink with than Polly, especially now that Michael’s around.”

“Oh,” Ada cast a pointed look over at the girl. “Now I’m jealous.”

“Don’t be, she’s not my sister. She’s not you.” Esme tousled Ada’s hair, and they smiled at each other. “For one thing, I’d never have to spend a day teaching her how to do a French braid. Or about how to gut a fish. Or about the banking system.”

“The banking system?” Ada raised one perfect eyebrow.

“It’s a business, and she wants to be a businesswoman. What was I supposed to do?”

Ada was smiling at her in a way Esme didn’t understand at first. “Far be it from me to tell another woman what to do with her life, but have you talked to Tommy about having kids yet?”

Fuck, this again. Esme raked her hand through her hair. Not Ada too. “It’s been busy.”

“But he has a plan, doesn’t he?”

“He will.”

“Yeah, and when it’s over and you’ve got your breath back, will you ask him about it?”

“I don’t think—” The phone rang. “Lucy, who is that?”

“Inspector Moss. Shall I put it through to Mr. Shelby?”

“No, give it here.” Esme crossed the room, holding out her hand, and Lucy put the phone into it. “Hello?” For a moment, there was perfect silence.” Then: “Thank you. No— _don’t!_ Just hold on. I’ll be there in a minute.”

By the time she hung up, she had gone so tense that Ada had produced a cigarette from her purse and was offering it to her, while Lucy had produced a gun from the desk and was also offering it to her.

“No thanks,” Esme said to both, instead going to the coatrack in the back to retrieve the car keys from Tommy’s coat. “Ada, I’ll run round later and help you unpack; Lucy, if Charlie and Scudboat come in, tell them an emergency came up, but they need to stay, and I’ll be back very soon. I still need a paddle to the Patch.”

“Be safe,” Ada called after her.

“I’ll try!"

Esme drove at breakneck speed, careening through puddles and around corners until she finally screeched to a halt in front of the jail. She rushed inside. Sergeant Moss was waiting for her there, his round face grim.

“Is Campbell back yet?” she said.

“No, but he will be soon. And he’ll see your car out front.” Though he was still in her employ—or, more accurately, Tommy’s—there was reproach in his voice bordering on the insubordinate, and to be fair, perhaps she deserved it. If this business went badly, it would mean deep trouble for both of them.

“I’ll be quick,” she reassured him.

Moss led her down the familiar rows of holding cells until they came to the one containing Polly. Polly stood to face them as imperiously as if she owned the jail she was in.

“How can she bail me out when I don’t even know what I’ve been arrested for?” Polly demanded.

Sergeant Moss visibly winced.

“You’re not under arrest,” Esme said. “The Sergeant was doing me a favor. Keys?” He handed them over. “You can go if you want.”

He walked quickly away with the expression of a man fleeing a forest fire, which would have been amusing were Esme not directly in the fire’s path.

Polly walked slowly towards her until the bars were almost touching her face. Her hands, when she gripped those bars, were white-knuckled. Her words, when she spoke, dripped with venom. “You have chosen the wrong day to play at power, Esme Lee.”

“I know, and I’m sure you’ll hold a blade to my throat as soon as I unlock that door, but before you do that, you should listen to me.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

“Look, I knew you might try to negotiate with Campbell, and I told Moss to stop you if you did, because he’s—”

“He can’t even deal with me himself?” Polly demanded.

Derailed, Esme frowned. “Who?”

“Tommy!” she all but shouted.

“He didn’t send me.”

“Oh. Oh...you’re taking initiative.” Polly’s lips curled into a thin smile. “You know what this is? This is like the time I found Katie playing with a loaded gun. That’s what this is.”

“Just fucking listen for five minutes, all right? Before you attempt to negotiate with Campbell, or give him information, or whatever is in your plan, you should know what kind of a man Campbell is.”

“He almost tried to kill you. I’ve heard.” Polly hit the bars hard, and they reverberated eerily, reminding Esme that they were not alone, that the cells were too full of quiet, listening people. Not that Polly appeared to notice. “We’re _all_ killers, Esme! And he’s got no reason to kill me, so unlock the fucking door!”

“No. Listen.” Esme’s voice dropped until her words were barely audible. “The first time—”

“What?” Polly demanded.

Esme spoke a tiny bit louder, glaring all the while. “The first time I met him. The first time, when I tried to get information on Freddie, he tried to fuck me.”

“A man thinking with his cock. What news!”

“He tried it while I was handcuffed to the chair.”

Polly’s eyes narrowed.

Esme contrived a shrug. “Arthur had good timing. It was fine. But when Campbell came to kill me, he could have shot me. _He should have shot me._ If he’d shot me in the head as soon as he came in the house, we wouldn’t be here. But he took his time. He talked forever, and when he went to do it, he got in close, tried to choke me with his hands, looking me in the eyes, even though he knew he was wounded in the leg, even though he knew my hands were free. He’s smart enough to take on Tommy, and he enjoys cruelty so much it makes him stupid. I wouldn’t get into a room alone with him for a stable full of horses or a vault full of gold.”

Polly was blank, and Esme found herself holding her breath, childishly, and maybe that was appropriate because nothing about this was sensible, or rational. She might have been holding the keys, but the power wasn’t hers, it was all just desperation. _Please._

When Polly spoke, she spoke quietly. “What about for a son?” she said, and Esme knew she’d lost. “For family?” Disappointment mixed with the rage in her voice. “This is what you’ll never understand. I thought Michael, my son, was dead for twelve fucking years. And I’m not going back. Unlock the door.”

“Polly—”

“Do you have any more advice? No?” Polly’s whisper rose to a shout. “Then unlock the _fucking_ door!”

Esme’s hands had balled into fists, to keep her from taking a step back. “This is a mistake.”

“I’ll see Campbell whether you leave me in here or not. It’s only a matter of time.”

Esme sighed. She put the key in the lock, but before she turned it, she leaned in. She was the wrong person for this, and Polly was the wrong person to speak to this way, but she had to try. She had to try begging, even if she knew it wouldn’t work. “Please don’t do this. We can find another way.”

At this most unexpected moment, dryness cut through Polly’s desperation. “Don’t bluff me, Esme Lee. If you had any other way, you’d have come in and told me that first."

As soon as the lock turned in the key, Polly put her shoulder into the door and it flew open, knocking Esme back a few steps. Polly rushed through, slammed her up against the bars of the next cell, and yes, sure enough, there was a knife in her hand. God knew how she’d managed to hide it from Moss. Perhaps she had pockets deep in her skirts too.

“If there is one thing I have learned in this family, in this city,” Polly murmured, “It is that if I need anything, I have to take it for myself.” Her voice had gone low to a velvet growl. “As I have. As I will.”

“Are you going to cut me or not?” Esme was just barely able to get the words out.

Polly gripped her face so hard that Esme could feel the pain radiating down her jaw. She fought the instinct to close her eyes. Then Polly let go and walked away, leaving Esme standing there, breathing hard. The door to the holding cells clanged shut behind her.

A familiar voice called to Esme from two cells down. It was Mr. Pearson with the scraggly straw-colored beard, who always came in with big bets after payday and liked to bet on first-timers. Fond of dogs. Quite a mortal man, and a welcome one, after that goddess of rage.

“Trouble at home, Mrs. Shelby?” he said.

Esme rubbed her jaw, trying to get rid of the tingling feeling. “Something like that. Another fight, Mr. Pearson?”

He shrugged. “Just had a bit too much fun, Mrs. Shelby. Nobody died.”

“Well, good luck with the trial.”

“Good luck with her.”

Esme nodded. She walked back into the front offices and handed the keys over to a terrified Sergeant Moss. Polly stood in a corner, already with a lit cigarette, looking out the window pointedly. Esme didn't bother trying to talk to her again. She simply walked past, went out the door, and drove away well before Campbell arrived.

 

 

 

**NOW**

Not for the first time, Tommy was finding the menace of his own reputation to be fucking inconvenient. As he talked to the various Romani Londoners that Molly brought him (some of whom were distant relatives of his own), all their conversations consisted of increasingly impatient questions on his side, and fumbled, nervous answers on theirs. He talked to Esme's coworkers, and to a few of Esme’s distant cousins, and finally to Elsie, who she’d lived with, and no matter who they were, no matter what age they were, no matter how rich or poor, they always, always would look over at Luther periodically, as if to reassure themselves that Tommy wasn’t going to, what? Explode into a random rage and tear them apart in the middle of the camp? More than once, Tommy found himself clenching his jaw just to get past the overwhelming urge to tell them to calm the _fuck_ down. Of course that wouldn’t have helped.

The interviews weren’t particularly useful for his purposes; they added very little knowledge to his hunt, and they were stuffed full of little details that made him feel workday weary before the sun hit noon: that Esme was occasionally called on to negotiate with particular clients, because her ability to articulate made her come off as a hard woman to fool; that she had favorites among the horses, and became irritable when one of them had to be sold; that she liked to dance when she got drunk. (Still. All these things, still.)

It was all so tiring and so hopeless that Tommy took to cutting through the domestic detritus with one simple question: “Tell me about when she left.”

Elsie kept looking fixedly down at her lap as she spoke. “Esme just left the camp for London one afternoon, and she said she’d be back the next morning, but when I woke up, she was gone.”

“Did she take her things with her?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Elsie’s eyes flickered over to Luther again. “They were only some clothes and some papers. Nothing important, I think.”

“No money?”

“No. I think she had a place where she put it all away. Maybe she took it to the bank. Luther paid her properly, but she didn’t buy much. She didn’t have to, since she was living with me, and we lived simple.”

Tommy glanced at Luther. “How much did you pay her?”

Luther shrugged his massive shoulders. “Eight pounds a month. It’s close to what she’d get in a factory,” he added defensively.

“It’s twenty a month in the Longbridge car factory.”

“Do they usually let women work there?” Luther drawled.

How long had it been since Tommy had hit anyone? About a day now? It felt like an eternity. “I’ll take her things now,” he said, instead. “She may want them back.”

“Are you sure? She did leave them behind,” said Elsie, uncertainly.

“Do you have them or not?”

“I, ah. I gave them to Luther, to store. In case she did come back. It’s just that, with the children and the baby, you know. I don’t have much space.”

Something slipped into place. Some thought that had stirred in the back of his mind for a long time, one that he’d constantly dismissed. Tommy sat in the silence, letting her squirm a little, thinking on it, and then he came to a decision. “Luther and I can get them in a minute,” Tommy said. “There’s one person I’ve not interviewed yet. Your son.”

“Oh, Cole's far too young—”

“Your stepson, Ned. Fourteen is old enough to talk, isn’t it?”

Now she was so frightened of him, she’d forgotten that she was supposed to pretend she wasn’t frightened. “I’ve told you everything I know, Mr. Shelby. I don’t think he knows anything else.”

He could try and calm her down, but at this point, what good would that do? And besides, at that moment he felt himself something to be feared. He spoke very gently, but did not try to change his expression at all. It had the desired effect. “I’m trying to find my wife, Mrs. Waters. Please, get your stepson.”

It had been a long, long while since Tommy had had cause to talk to anyone under the age of eighteen that wasn’t family, but it turned out that talking to the boy as if he was a grown man worked well enough.

“Do you know who I am?” he said.

The boy paused a second, hesitant in the face of such an obvious question. “Yes.”

“Did you know my wife?”

“Yes.”

There was nothing childishly aggressive about the monosyllabic answers, just a careful, calculated, watchful air that reminded him of Esme in the very early days. (Or maybe everything was reminding him of Esme at this point.) The boy feared him exactly as much as he should; no more, no less. As he asked him simple questions about what he’d been told and received simple confirmations, Tommy let his shoulders relax a little, and the boy responded, slouching a little, scratching at a bug bite on his arm, realizing that Tommy didn’t intend to pose any threat. His questions swept on like the current in a little stream, easy and natural.

_She lived with you and your family, right? Yes. She paid by helping with you and your siblings, right? Yes. Do you know how much she paid? No, you can ask my mum. Where did she get the money? Working for Luther. And how good was she at that work? Very good, I think. Did she start sleeping with him in the spring or summer?_

The boy frowned. “I think it was—”

Luther was on his feet in an instant, Tommy matching him. Both hands in his pockets, right hand on the gun, left on the razor, fingers sliding along the cold metal, anchoring him through the bitter taste already in his mouth.

"Think you've misunderstood Ned, there," said Luther.

"Fuck off," said Tommy, very quietly. The girl scrambled away. The gun was the smart choice, but God, he wanted the razor. He kept it so sweetly sharp, it wouldn’t take more than a scratch...The people around them in the camp had stopped talking, begun to edge away.

"So what was it?" Tommy said, still very quiet, tensed but unmoving. "She needed the extra coin? You had her name, could have turned her in for faking her death? And you were were what? Bored? You couldn’t take a coin to the whorehouse like every other—"

"It wasn't—"

"What did you do to her?"

_"She came to me!"_

Luther tossed it in his face with such savage triumph, bitter and satisfied and sure, that if the man was lying, then he was a world-class liar, a liar like Tommy had never seen before. And not one onlooker contradicted it. Never had Tommy hated the close-knit nature of the community more. This was like being tied naked to a church steeple, humiliation like he hadn’t experienced in years. Humiliation not because his honor was insulted, but because he knew he had already betrayed himself by merely standing, by longing, so openly, for a fight when he had no standing to claim one. But he had to know why it happened. That was more important than anything else.

"She was drunk," Tommy said, after a minute.

"Stone sober," said Luther. He had gained control over his face for a moment, but the triumph was still there underneath, curdling every word.

Tall, capable, confident, and good with horses. There were few things about this man that Tommy knew, but matching them up against Esme, he couldn't immediately find anything to rule Luther out, however much he tried. And if this man belonged to her, in any way, didn't that mean that Tommy was prohibited from killing him? He wavered. The razor handle was so cold, nestled in his left palm.

Luther took that silence for defeat. "Did you think she'd keep faith for you?" he said, and Tommy was surprised to find that under that careless exterior, there lay a real rage. " _You?_ The same man that forced her out of her house and erased her from existence? The man that only noticed she was missing a full seven months after she'd disappeared? How could you expect her to care about you if you never did a thing for her until now, when she’s fucking gone? _She’s been gone._ Where were you?"

Razor.

Tommy yanked it out of his pocket, blade extended, only to find the blunt barrel of a pistol shoved against the back of his head. He froze. He still had his eyes fixed on Luther, but in his peripheral vision, he could see a few other men preparing for a fight, could see the glint of the noonday sun off their weapons.

"You’re not in Birmingham anymore, Thomas." It was Molly, standing behind him. "And shedding blood is not allowed in my camp. You know that."

The gun against his head helped clarify his mind. "You lied to me. You've never done that before."

"I never lied. She came, she lived here, and then she disappeared; that was all true."

"You lied by omission."

"I was only keeping the peace. I was afraid this might happen."

Slowly, Tommy flipped the razor back into the handle. Then he turned. Now the gun was pressed between his eyes. For Molly's old age, she had remarkably steady hands.

"Reggie and Arnold will get you a cab ride home," she said.

"I still have questions." His voice was velvet. His hands itched with muscle memories of other fights, other guns pressed to his head, sprays of warm wet blood. He had more than enough pain and humiliation to metabolize, and God, he was ready for it.

But it was not to be. Molly held firm, and he knew that this was no way to start a war, especially a civil war. All he had besides the gun and the razor were a pile of mistakes growing higher by the fucking minute. He had come alone, knowing he'd be half-crippled by his own emotion. That had been the first mistake.

Perhaps Molly sensed the agony within his body, the way every muscle tightened, poised, gathered up its energy, but was not allowed to release. The endless demand he couldn’t answer. At any rate, her voice was surprisingly gentle. "You can have answers, because you have worthwhile questions. But you can’t have blood, because you have no worthwhile claim to it.”

Despite his worst desires, Tommy found it was true.

 

 

 

**THEN**

"Oi! Esme!" As Esme strolled through the Black Patch, Johnny Dogs was bearing down on her with a speed that belied his height, beaming all the while. "How's my favorite cousin?" His dark eyes sparkled with mischief.

She gave him a reproving look, but couldn’t help a smile herself. "Here on business." 

He fell into step with her as she made her way to Queen Mary Lee’s place. 

"Don't think I don't know that you say that to every cousin, by the way,” she added.

"Well, Esme. It has to be true for someone. I have to have one favorite cousin. Why can't it be true with you?" 

"Why can't you ever give it a rest?" But she said it fondly; he really was her favorite. 

“Aw, you know me. Always busy.”

“Something like that. How’s your children?”

“Good, good. Dale is getting his teeth in, though. Won’t stop crying about it, and he chewed up the reins to an old bridle when his mum wasn’t looking.”

“Boil an old belt clean and let him chew it to pieces,” Esme advised.

“I’ll tell the wife that. Is this business of yours going to take long? You should stay for dinner. Have a drink, see the family.”

“A drink? Johnny boy, a drink with you turns into two, and then three, and then I’ll fall into the canal on the ride home and poor Scudboat will have to jump in and fish me out, ‘cause I’ll be too drunk to swim.”

“Then stay the night! I can have the wife throw you a couple of blankets, and there’s no clouds tonight. Don’t you miss the stars?”

They had reached Queen Mary Lee’s tent. Esme turned and looked over the encampment around them. Right now, under the evening sun, everything was lit gorgeously golden, the coarse grasses studded with the purple of heather and and yellow of gorse; a few women had already begun cooking dinner, and the smoke from those fires mingled with the sound of children calling to each other in a game of tag and drifted over the whole encampment. When night fell, Esme knew, there was no cleaner air to breathe, no better food to eat, no better people to be with. She still missed it so much she dreamed of it sometimes.

“My family’s in trouble. It’s not the time.”

“We have honey,” Johnny Dogs said. “You can dip your bread in it.”

That had been her childhood favorite. Esme smiled through a caught throat. “You know,” she said, “You’re possibly my favorite man alive, Johnny boy, but sometimes I think you’re the devil himself.”

“I’m tempting you in the name of family and friendship, Esme. It doesn’t get more angelic than that.”

Before Esme could think of a retort, they were interrupted.

“I hear you have business with me?” Queen Mary Lee stepped out of her tent and squinted against the sunlight to look at Esme, her brown eyes turned to amber. How on earth she’d known that, Esme didn’t know and didn’t question. She knew Mary had sources everywhere. 

“Yes,” Esme replied simply. 

Mary gestured at the tent flap, and then disappeared back inside. With a quick hug to Johnny Dogs, Esme followed, heart already beginning to beat faster. 

When Esme had been a child, Queen Mary had begun her reign over the Black Patch and made a name for herself with her sharp tongue, probing eyes, and unerring insight.  Esme had worshipped her at that age. Many a time her wisdom had saved one or other of the Black Patch inhabitants from serious trouble, and she was as beloved by her people as she was feared by everybody else. But now Esme knew that she no longer counted among those beloved, with her father having wronged the Favells, her family name disgraced, and her marriage to Tommy considered not much better than one to a gadje. Was it any wonder that she felt as if she were Finn squaring up to fight Arthur? She took a deep breath before venturing in.

Inside, Mary sat down, and gestured for Esme to sit across from her. She waited in serene silence.

“I brought these for you.” Esme handed her a green tin and watched with some trepidation as Mary removed the lid and peered down at the tin’s contents.

“What’s this, sweetmeats? Your husband has strange taste.”

“Oh, that was from John’s kids. They love to make all kinds of concoctions.”

“Ah.” Mary put the lid back on and set the tin aside. “I thought that was an odd message, even coming from your husband.”

“That’s just a present from some family, entirely separate. Tommy sent me to negotiate.” Esme’s palms were beginning to sweat.

Mary fixed her with a piercing look. “From what I hear of Birmingham, I’m not sure you’re in a position to negotiate.”

“Then I won’t waste your time.” Esme spread her hands in a placating gesture. “Henty is dead, Esau is long dead before her. Mrs. E. J. Pilkington and Tangye Limited have legal control of this land, even though the woman has likely never set foot on the land in her life and the company would just as soon carve it up like it was some common bit of heath.”

Mary interrupted her. “I thought you weren’t going to waste my time. I’m well aware of our predicament, and I am not sitting idly by while the future of the Black Patch is at stake. But I fail to see how this is at all relevant to your family’s troubles.”

“Considering my husband’s plans for the future, I thought it would be good to set those circumstances in your mind before I come to ask for soldiers. As many as you can spare, and for as long as you can spare. Perhaps longer than you first offered. I’m aware of the concerns of this camp, and I would like to reward your contribution to the family when the time is right.”

Molly leaned back slightly and folded her hands in her lap. After a moment, she spoke. "Thomas Shelby always pays his debts, is that it?"

"Yes," Esme lied.

“And you?”

Now that was a question she could answer with more confidence. “I always pay my debts.”

"Mm. I wonder if the Favell family would agree with that."

Esme’s mouth set. It had been a while since she’d heard that name. "Debts are not passed from father to children until the father dies. I’m not responsible for my father’s failings; not yet.”

"He's as good as dead, isn’t he?"

"But not dead."

"Dead or gone forever, what is the difference? He’s not coming back. And his name rests on you, even if you’ve covered it with the Shelby name.”

Carefully, carefully. “I know that your memory is long,” Esme said slowly. “And I appreciate that you’re wary on behalf of your people.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

Esme nodded in acknowledgement. “But. I do believe that this is a good deal. I am confident that my husband can be persuaded to part with a considerable amount of money if he believes it to be a good investment. This crisis is the perfect time for you to demonstrate that the Black Patch is exactly that, a good investment.”

“A good investment?”

“Yes.”

“Not the land of his family? Not the place his grandmother grew up? Not the best opportunity to make a little justice in this misbegotten world?”

“All those things, yes. But I find that self-interest is the easiest way to communicate with him. Sometimes.”

Mary smiled a small smile of satisfaction. “So this is a double-handed affair.”

Esme tried, she really did. But that made no sense to her. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re not negotiating on behalf of your husband about this issue, you’re negotiating with him. You’re not a messenger, you’re an agent. Isn’t that so?”

Esme gave up on subterfuge. “If you can help me convince him, it will be well worth the effort. To secure the future of the Black Patch, anything is worth the effort.”

“Why haven’t you convinced him yet?”

“When he’s in his plans, he’s in his head. The Patch is an entirely separate matter to him now. It would be better to demonstrate it as a source of strength first than to start with a demand for money. The argument makes itself every time he depends on your soldiers.”

“You really think you can convince a Shelby to part with that much money?”

There it was. There it was. Couched as a doubt of her abilities, but an invitation for her to give her argument nonetheless. “I think there’s a good possibility,” Esme said slowly, “And that’s enough. The Patch is worth fighting for, Mary. Not just for you, but for me. When I come here, just for a night, just to see Johnny Dogs and the kids, eat a little, drink...it reminds me of my family, my childhood. Now I know that it’s closed to me. It’s never going to be my children’s the way it used to be, and I accept that. But it gives me peace to know that at least it’s out here, within a day’s journey. To know that some of us exist, together, ruled by our own hand. By you.”

“Sentimentality.”

“Yes,” Esme admitted. “And personal, as well. I helped birth Johnny’s youngest daughter, and now she’s six, I think. Maybe seven. I was that age when we were living in Lichfield. It was a little house, but it had a little red door, and I could see the three spires of the cathedral from my window, and my dad let me keep this pet pig out in the yard, and we were happy there. But they tossed us out. Something about dad’s debts, again. My oldest sister, she got so upset, because they wouldn’t stop to let us take our things; she started screaming at one of the policeman. That was the first broken jaw I’d ever treated. Not well. But we didn’t have money for a doctor.”

Esme went on, “When they threw us out, we came here. And I hated it here. I was so sure we should go back, didn’t understand why we couldn’t. But now...if they kick all of you out, where will you go? Where will you take her? London? That’s why I’m here. I see an opportunity to prevent this happening to the next generation.”

Mary’s eyes betrayed nothing, and from that, Esme made one last gamble: “And I’m also here because you don’t have a better plan to prevent this. I know you’re no Zilpha, that you didn’t approve of the marriage she made in your absence, uniting the Lees with the Shelbys. I know that it hasn’t helped, adding us on to the way policemen always think you’re criminals. Before, they’d always say it, pikey this and pikey that, but now? Now they point to the Shelbys as proof, with me a clear tie right back to you, and I know you must not like that. So why would we be in this tent right now if you had any other choice?”

“You’ve made a mistake,” said Mary coolly, and for a moment Esme’s heart stopped. Then Mary went on: “Have you not considered that I have a way to get the money myself, and that I am simply enjoying the audacity of your proposal?”

Esme allowed herself to smile. “It’s possible. But I don’t think so.”

“Hm.” 

“Cole!” Mary shouted suddenly. 

A towheaded, red-nosed boy of about eleven poked his head in. “Yes?”

“Tea for me and Mrs. Shelby, please. No rush. We’ll be here for a while.” 

 

 

**NOW**

So Tommy did all the interviews again, more miserably and more accurately than before. Molly kept him in her wagon at first, perhaps thinking that having Luther out of sight would take him out of mind, but later, as people sat to dinner and the weekend fun began, he was invited out for a smoke and a drink with all the rest. Hardly enjoyable, when all he could think of was how much Esme would have enjoyed the fresh wind and the kids playing and the language, but he was aware that he was being watched, so he put up a decent enough front.

In short, a useless, brutal afternoon that cemented what he’d already known; that Esme had forged a happy life without him, and that she had left it, for no apparent reason, without a trace.

After seemingly dozens of people stopping by to greet him, as well as dozens of curious kids peeking out at him (one tried to steal his cap), Tommy felt much like a zoo animal might. He was almost relieved when Luther showed up, bottle in one hand. He had on what might charitably be called a neutral expression. 

“Molly says I must make the peace,” he said gruffly,“So here.” He passed over the bottle, which turned out to be full of whiskey. “Call it an olive branch.”

Now Tommy didn’t see any logical reason to cut the man, which made him want to do it all the more. Instead, he silently offered Luther a cigarette, and the big man hunkered down next to him and took it. For a long while, they took turns swallowing whiskey and swallowing words that burned on the way down as badly as any drink. Eventually, the bottle was nearly empty. The sun had nearly finished setting, and the sky had gone indigo. Mothers chased stray children and dragged them to bed. With no ashtrays, there was a small pile of cigarette butts at each man’s feet.

“Did you find anything useful?” Luther said.

“No, it was all the same. Except this time, a senile old woman gave me some letter to give to her granddaughter in the Italian Quarter. Apparently she thinks that only gangsters can go there.”

“Delilah, right?”

“How did you know?”

“She once told me that the Irish were going to invade London by plane,” Luther said dryly.

Tommy almost smiled, which is how he knew he was certainly drunk. “Sharp as a razor, then. As I said.”

“The Italian Quarter does have its share of gangsters,” Luther acknowledged. “Darby Sabini is gone, but his brothers are not.”

Tommy gave him a look. 

Luther shrugged. “She got newspapers sometimes. I read them when I was bored. If she was a little drunk, and also bored, we’d talk about it.”

Maybe Luther was a sentimental drunk. Tommy didn’t know why he was having this conversation, but he was deep in it already, and he figured he might as well go on with it. “Did she talk about the business much?”

“Sure. Not any more or less than anyone else, though maybe more about some of her favorite horses.”

“No. The family business. Shelby Limited.”

“Oh.” Luther would have made a terrible gangster; he considered lying so openly that seeing him do it was as easy as reading a newspaper headline. “Not much,” he finally said, which rang true, but with so little detail it was unsatisfying. 

Presently, the bottle was empty.

“Can I ask you a question?” Luther said.

Tommy, who was by then half-leaning on a barrel full of collected rainwater, turned and gave him a look of pure disdain.

“Yeah, all right, I’ll just say it. You clearly want to find her. And you’re not an idiot.”

“That’s not what Esme said.”

Luther shrugged. “She called me worse.”

“She called me a liar.” That was light compared to some of the things she’d called him, but it was the worst he was willing to own, because it was demonstrably true. 

Tommy half-expected a jab from Luther over that; was almost disappointed when no jab came. Tommy had set it up so well for one. Instead, Luther stared at the moonlight catching in the empty bottle. "She called me uncomplicated," he said. The expression on his face was anything but uncomplicated. 

“How is that worse?” said Tommy quietly. 

“It isn’t.”

Fuck, he wasn’t drunk enough to keep this civil. Tommy closed his eyes, briefly. “What was the question?”

“You want to find her, and you’re not an idiot. So when she went missing seven months ago, why not come then? Why wait?”

“She used to send me telegrams. One every three months, at the beginning of the month. One missed telegram is a mistake, an accident. It happened once, and then three months after that, another telegram came, with no explanation. I make allowances for that. But two missed telegrams can’t be ignored.”

“Why did she send them? What did she say?”

“Same word, every time. ‘Alive.’”

“Alive,” Luther repeated. In the moonlight, Tommy couldn’t make out much of his features or his dark eyes, but he saw enough of the man’s profile to see when he swallowed hard and gripped the bottle tighter. 

Selfishly, horribly, Tommy felt a connection to the man in that moment. At least he didn’t have to be alone in his fear and his misery. Not now. But the moment Luther caught Tommy looking at him, he released the bottle, stubbed out his last cigarette, stood abruptly, and walked away. 

After a moment’s dull thought, Tommy got up too and went in search of another bottle.

 

 

 

**THEN**

She woke to the sounds again. Another night, another nightmare. They’d almost gotten to two weeks with none, and now it was two in three days? Fuck. Esme rubbed her eyes.

_ “Tommy.” _

“...Yeah.”

With the doors to their bedrooms open, Esme could hear him across the hall, fumbling with the finicky bedside lamp. This time, she gathered the blanket around her shoulders before getting up and shuffling across the hall into his room.

He was already opening a package of cigarettes, and noticing that his hands didn’t shake, she went to him and gave one shoulder a little push.

“Move over,” she said.

Tommy did. “No tea?”

Esme slid into the bed with a soft sound of pleasure at receiving the warmth of the spot he’d vacated. “It’s cold. If you want—”

“No.” Cigarette between his lips, he had to try the lighter twice before achieving the first exhale, faint white smoke pluming in the golden light of the lamp, then disappearing into the darkness at the edges of the room.

“All right.” She tucked the blanket more securely around her shoulders, then leaned back against the headboard. “Was it—”

“No,” he said again, not unkindly. It was a mere economy of words, as it so often was between them, half-sentences murmured and whole ones unsaid.

Esme gave it two cigarettes of waiting. Two and no longer; she was very tired, and did not like the smell of the smoke when it became too intense. She would have gotten up and parted the heavy curtains, but she felt protective in these moments, of this time, of these bare wooden floorboards showing scratches and wear under the lamplight, of this knitted green blanket faintly scratchy but deliciously warm over her shoulders, even, yes, of that cigarette between his fingers. Of him.

During those two cigarettes, she said nothing and did nothing, except to pass over the ashtray. Then she took the package from his hand and put it back on the side table.

“Tomorrow’s soon,” she said mildly. “And I’m tired. So come on.”

He gave her a look of disapproval at the confiscation of the cigarettes, but closed his eyes and lay back. Esme turned off the light.

In the dark, they settled closer to each other. With the faint smell of the pungent ointment, with Tommy at her right, with the very familiar wood of the headboard cutting against her shoulders, it brought her back a few months, to those awful shuddering shallow breaths. But he could breathe easy now, and beneath his pale skin all fractures appeared to have mended, or at least almost all fractures, so she could guiltlessly enjoy the only remnant of his convalescence: her hand running lightly over his forehead. The warmth of her fingers bleeding into the odd architecture of his forehead, a little of the bridge of his nose, his skin slightly cool, her movement slow and gentle like waves lapping on a beach, pulling him under the tide of sleep. Months of this, and it was still like magic, the way he relaxed under it even though the eyes were the most vulnerable part of the body. He’d taught her that.

It was some small miracle that this remained despite his healing, would probably remain beyond the time ointment was no longer needed. Perhaps it was the silence. They never talked about it. Tenderness was permitted, but tenderness spoken of was a finger pressed to an open wound. He’d recoil on instinct. She’d recoil for other reasons.

It was hard to know what time had passed, but Esme began to sense that this had gone on longer than usual and yet he was still not breathing slow enough for sleep. At last Tommy shifted onto his side. Esme could see his eyes peering up at her; in the moonlight, they looked nearly silver.

“Go back to bed,” he said, resigned. “I won’t be sleeping tonight.”

Esme sighed. She turned on the lamp and passed over the cigarettes again, and the lighter, and the ashtray. But she didn’t leave the bed.

“You’re tired,” he said. It was a question.

“I know I’m tired.” She glanced over at him. “But it wasn’t tunnels this time, was it?”

He didn’t look back. “It can wait until the morning, Esme.”

“But I’m here now.”

Esme could see him turning it over in his head, through the lighter and through the cigarette. Slouching back, she refused to stop watching him; he’d stay all night if necessary. She had out-waited him before once, for three hours. They were stubborn in ways that almost fit.

Finally, he said, “Polly came into my office with something about how you need to keep in your own business. Did you try something with her today?”

Any other man, and she’d try the old,  _ yes, at the family meeting, didn’t you see? _ But not with him.

Tommy went on: “Campbell let her visit Michael, and promised to let him out tomorrow morning.”

“Did they negotiate?”

“Yes.”

Now it was Tommy’s turn to watch, and Esme’s turn to wish, restlessly, that he would not. She could feel them slipping down some hill, gaining momentum, the conversation tearing out of her grasp.

“Was the negotiation difficult?” she said.

“I think you know.” Tommy’s voice was bleak, and left no room for interpretation.

When Esme made no kind of reply, he glanced over. She was sitting there, thick hair partly in her face, eyes lost. “I told you to go back to bed,” he said. “I should have made you.”

“No,” she said, “I’m not here to be fucking ornamental. You were right to tell me.” There was nothing lost about her voice, but her chest ached, and some of that slipped into the sound.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He was talking to her like she was a horse, but she needed that gentleness now, so she chose to ignore it.

“Nothing to tell. Campbell didn’t get the chance. Arthur came, and then it was over. All in the past. You knew most of this, anyways, and you must have guessed the rest”

“But it was bad enough that you had to warn her."

Esme said nothing.

Tommy sighed. "Why didn’t you tell me about today? You had to know she wouldn’t take advice well from you.” It wasn’t terribly reproachful, just an invitation to talk out the decision.

“You think Polly would respond any better to you?” 

They looked at each other, and Tommy lifted his shoulders an inch, as if to say,  _ because you ask...yes. _

Esme scoffed and pushed at his knee. “You wouldn’t have even tried negotiating. You would have stopped Polly from going, and then I would have a war between the two of you on my hands. I knew you’d never let her go to him.”

He didn’t try to contradict it, merely said: “If you had allowed me to stop her, we’d both be asleep now.”

“No. Who knows what he'd have done to Michael, and she'd curse you, curse the whole house, maybe the whole family. She's be right to do it. A woman is not a dog. She needs choices. I gave Polly information, and that was all I could do.”

There was some noise outside, and they both stilled to hear it. But it was only a stray dog yelping at some stray drunk. Fuck, it was late, and Esme should go. It was the reasonable thing to do. So of course, instead, she didn’t go. Call him a bad influence.

“You know,” she said, “I should have shot him a year ago, and ended all of this. I could have ended this."

"No," he said. He said it with such certainty, damn him. Like there was a clear answer to something like this. 

“He was downstairs. I was looking at him. I had gun in my hand, and I hesitated.”

"It didn’t have to be him. It was always coming," Tommy said. "With or without him. This is our family, and there is always a Campbell coming, but he is not yours alone to kill. Eh? Look at me. That fucker has too many claims on his head to satisfy."

Esme forced herself to hold the stare, lips pressed thin to pre-empt any wavering. "I think I didn't kill him because I wasn’t sure I wanted to kill," she said, frustration palpable. "Moments after almost being killed myself, and that’s what I got caught on. Do you see how that makes me  _ fucking _ insane?"

Tommy shook his head, and if that was pity in his eyes, she was going to— "It doesn't make you mad," he said.

"It makes me a civilian." Esme said it like it was a dirty word. "We're in the middle of a war, and I don't know if I can change. I don't know if I want to change." He should know these things, as her husband. As their leader. She felt too tired to keep anything to herself, anyway. “In a war, you need soldiers, and I’m not made for it.”

“I don’t need soldiers.”

“Oh, don’t you?”

“No, because you already got them for me this afternoon. I don’t need you to be a soldier. I just need you to be my wife.”

It was rare for him to call her his wife; she knew that the incomplete, forced, playacted nature of the marriage disgusted him at times, as it sometimes disgusted her. But there was no audience here to cause a performance, and he said it like it was not only real, but solid, a position. A rank.  _ My wife. _

“You talk nonsense when you get tired,” she said. She looked at her hands, because that was a safe bet. He was turning her throat all kinds of unworkable.

Tommy made a sound of consideration, a little  _ mm  _ low in his throat _. _ “So do you.”

“What have  _ I _ said?”

“You shot a man four times, Esme. That’s not the sort of wound that washes out.”

“Three. I missed one of the shots.”

“Well, you certainly killed him, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“What do you think the difference was between him and Campbell?”

That answer was obvious: the man she’d shot had been armed and dangerous, while Campbell had already been wounded, disarmed, and put on the run at the time she had opportunity to kill him. But mostly, when it came down to it, the man she’d shot had been hurting Tommy. 

Esme wouldn’t humor him by saying this out loud. Instead, she said, “I can kill, but a soldier kills without question, and I can’t do that.”

“Not even for me?” The way he said it, he knew it was ridiculous. It was a line in a play. And she knew the right answer.

“Especially not for you.”

Tommy tilted his head slightly in acknowledgement, and then fell to flicking the lighter on and off restlessly.

Esme felt that her body was exhausted as ever, but her hands wished for something similar to fidget with, some outlet for her own restlessness while her mind stumbled on and on down paths she didn’t want to travel. “I wish I liked smoking,” she said, eventually. “You look like you get some relief from it.”

“I don’t know that I do,” Tommy said, well into his fifth cigarette of the night. “I don’t know that I ever did.”

“What about the whiskey?”

Tommy half-smiled. “That is a relief. But there will be birds singing in an hour. Not a good time for it.”

“No.” At last, Esme leaned back. “There’s nothing can be done about Campbell at the moment,” she said. “Polly is who she is, and won’t talk. Even if she did, I don’t know if I could help her. Best I can do is see to it that she’s safe in her own home if she does get drunk about it. Maybe she’ll have a shout at me. She seems to like that.”

“You like shouting too.”

“It’s a family trait.”

“Then we'll both have a shout. But there’s nothing else I can do, here and now,” she said, a little too firmly and decisively. “Absolutely nothing.”

A sardonic little smile played about Tommy’s lips. “Then why are you awake?”

“Fuck off.”

Esme’s arm brushed against his. Presently, they were holding hands.

_ Please _ , she thought,  _ don’t _ . And he didn't. Their rule of silence was preserved. He smelled like smoke, but his body was warm and good against her own, and that was what mattered. After a few seconds, she rested her head on his shoulder too. Old habits, bad habits, died hard.

“We need to think about something else now,” Esme said. This was not strictly true. They both needed to sleep, but he couldn’t and she wouldn’t, so.

“I’m open to suggestions,” Tommy said.

“I’m the one got out of bed tonight. Your turn.”

“To get out of bed?”

“To distract us. I don’t know, tell a story.”

“All the stories I know are either stories you already know, or war stories.”

“What about stories from before the war?”

“Those won’t put you to sleep.”

She tsked. “Then make something up."

From the sound of his voice, she knew he'd likely rolled his eyes. But he started the tale anyway: "Once upon a time, there was a woman named Esme."

"Very original."

"Thank you. This woman, Esme, lived with her people, had her own horse, and was happy. But one day, the police showed up, and tossed her and her family out of the house they had been using while the owner was away. Esme couldn’t have that, so she vanquished every policeman that came to her door.”

“Vanquished how?”

“Magic.”

“You’re a shit storyteller.”

“Better a shit storyteller than one too lazy to even try.”

“Go on, then.”

“But then, the police chief saw that his reputation was being threatened. He couldn’t allow one family to defy the law in his city, because it made him look foolish. And the mayor couldn’t allow it, either, because it would make him look foolish for appointing such an incompetent police chief. So together they conspired to draw Esme out into an open confrontation, away from her house and the people that gave her the strength for her magic. But Esme was too wily, and defeated them too.”

“Magic again?”

“Exactly. Now, the people in the city didn’t care about what had happened; things were just the same for them. But the country began to pay attention, because the newspapers branded it a matter of national security. The Home Secretary began to get interested. Troops were sent down. These, too, she vanquished. At this point, the Prime Minister publicly vowed he would arrest her, or be voted out of office. Much to his surprise, she was voted in instead, not as PM, but as Empress of the World. She ended up treating it like it was her sister’s baby that she had to watch on a night when she would rather sleep. She did the job well, brought justice to all, a chicken in every pot, and only complained about it when she was back in her house.“

“She should have found a different house,” said Esme, equal parts amused and disdainful.

“Couldn't. It was a matter of honor at that point.” 

“So in your story world, I’m an empress. Hm. Where are you in all this?” 

“This is a fair and just world you’re making, right? So. Likely in prison.” Tommy rubbed his nose with his thumb, and grinned.

“You really are a shit storyteller,” she said fondly. “You think that’s what I want? All your sins visited back on your head?”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” Immediately, Esme regretted saying that word and the manner in which she’d said it. His eyes were beginning to turn to something she needed to avoid at all costs. This was all so childish and so— “I wouldn’t want a perfectly just world, because then I’d have my own sins to answer for.”

“You don’t want perfect justice.”

“No.”

“What do you want, then?” he said softly. And then, oh, damn him for this. Without moving a muscle, he’d changed, just as she had feared. It seemed that his eyes caught a little more light, bluer than before. His hair was mussed and she knew what that felt like between her fingers and no, no, no. Her throat went dry. He could tell, and that showed too in the way his eyes flicked down, briefly, once. 

When he spoke, his voice had gone down several notes, and rasped in a way that made her suppress a shiver. “Eh? Just tell me what you want, Esme.”

Esme knew when to cut her losses. She blinked, and just like that, got enough of her mind functioning again; she wrapped the blanket tighter round her shoulders. “I should sleep.”

“Why?”

Jesus Christ. She climbed out of bed and began to head for the door. “There will be birds soon. It’s not a good time.”

“For what?” he said, still quiet, but demanding too. 

“For anything.”

“When is a good time?”

“Tommy. We need to sleep.”

“So this is it?” There was something different in his voice, that time. Esme paused at the door, moonlight her only guide to his face, moonlight enough. “I'm asking.”

She kept it steady. “We need to sleep so we can be at our best. We need to be at our best because we have a family to protect. We are not at our best when we’re falling asleep sitting up.” It was too many words, unnecessary, cluttered, and she hated saying it, but what was the alternative? Getting back in that bed with him? Letting it happen?

Tommy had become unreadable. “I see,” was all he said. “Goodnight, Esme.”

She could think of an alternative. She could think of something else to say. But look at him. He’d had a hard day, been wrecked by the night, by the sleeplessness, and that was all it was. She knew what it would be like to give in to the temptation and knew it acutely, could smell sweet grass and see the stars above and feel his hand threading through her hair. Even now, even a year later. But comforting sleeplessness was not a good enough reason for her to give into that again. Only one reason would be good enough, and it did not exist. It was not real.

“Goodnight,” she said.

 

 

 

**NOW**

When Tommy finally walked into the hotel at 9am, he knew he looked awful. He’d awoken quite early in the morning from an unsatisfactory sleep on the ground, wrapped in some blanket, with the hangover of a lifetime and only somewhat patchy memories of drinking the night before. Nonetheless, his money was good, and while he was given several judgmental looks, he couldn’t muster the energy to take offense.

On his way to the elevator, he stopped at the concierge’s desk and asked if anyone had tried calling him.

“A Miss Hawthorne, twice yesterday and once this morning. And a Mrs. Shelby, also this morning.” The concierge looked studiously blank.

“Anything from a Mrs. Gray?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Shelby.”

Tommy couldn’t tell if the concierge was putting any kind of weight on his name in particular, but he couldn’t be arsed. If the man thought that he, Tommy, was carrying on various affairs, what did it matter? 

Up in his room, Tommy called Lucy first, and then Lizzie, gleaning more or less the same story from both. The Chinese affair was not over; the racetracks had been hit; John had lost his temper; the retaliation may have been too much.  _ Come home. _

It was beginning to look like he’d taken the room for no reason. Oh, but it felt so good just to sit on a bed after the night he’d had…

Nevertheless, half an hour later, he was knocking on Ada’s door. 

“Mum!” a little voice yelled, and he was tempted then and there to whip out the pins and pick the lock. Ada would be so angry, but he hadn’t seen Karl in months, and children could grow so much in that time, learn whole vocabularies and turn into such different tiny people—

The door opened a crack, so that only one brown eye and the business end of a revolver showed.

“It’s not Monday yet,” said Ada calmly. Then, exasperated: “For fuck’s sake, Tommy, you couldn’t have called ahead?”

“I did call ahead, but you wouldn’t—”

Ada shut the door in his face.

Tommy rested his forehead on the wood of the door and gave it a minute before he hammered on the door again with his fist.

“What?” Ada shouted through the door.

“Can I come in?”

“No!”

“Why have you got a revolver?”

“Why can’t you fuck off?”

Tommy took a deep breath. Now was not the time to get into it with his sister. “I’m wondering why my sister is expecting company on Monday.”

“I’m not allowed to have a social life?”

“Does your social life usually involve guns?”

He could picture her rolling her eyes. “It’s nothing. I just owe someone some money.”

“Ada…”

“Fuck off, Tommy.”

“I think she’s, ah. I think she’s dead,” he said, as if he was afraid of saying it too loudly.

“What?”

_ “I think she’s dead.” _

The door opened. In the doorway stood Ada, hair wild, nightgown partly stained, revolver still in her hand, but not aimed at him.

“I told myself I wouldn’t leave London without her, but I have a ten-thirty train ticket in my pocket,” said Tommy, voice thick. “It’s that or let John and Arthur burn down Birmingham while I chase ghosts.”

“I’m sorry.” And she was.

Tommy just shook his head, once. Fuck but it was good just to be standing in front of her for a moment, to be with her. He loved Arthur and he loved John and he loved Finn, but they weren’t the same.

“Why did you come here?” Ada said, after a minute.

“To see Karl.” The corner of Tommy’s mouth lifted in a smile, and he waved to the tiny boy peering curiously at him from behind the arm of the sofa. “Hello.”

Ada tried to shut the door, but Tommy caught it. Surprisingly, Ada didn’t bother trying to threaten him with the revolver, only glared. “Why did you come?” she repeated.

“You don’t look good, Ada.”

“Thanks.”

“No, the revolver, your flat...can’t you take a loan? Not from me, from the company. From Polly.”

“Did Polly send you?”

“No.”

“Am I murdering some communist to pay off the loan?”

“No!”

“Then the loan’s from you.”

“Ada...” He could help her. She was so close, he could touch her. All the money in the world and she would have none of it, and for fuck’s sake, she had dark circles under her eyes the way Mum had when Dad left, looked just the same, pale and determined. “He wouldn’t have to know.”

“Who?” said Ada, sweetly, and Tommy knew he was doomed. He shook his head. “No, go on,” Ada said. “Tell me who it is. Who wouldn’t have to know if I took your blood money?”

“It would be from the legitimate side of the--

“There is no legitimate side!”

“--business, and it wouldn’t be a betrayal of Freddie to take care of his son.”

“ _ My _ son. Who I am already caring for. You think I’d put my pride above Karl?”

“No. No, Karl looks healthy. However, I think you’d put your pride above yourself.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine, Ada. And Freddie isn’t fine.”

“Freddie’s in hospital.”

“With hundreds of other men with Spanish flu. Probably in pain, and not enough doctors, and not enough nurses, and not--”

_ “We have to stop!”  _

Tommy went silent. She had shouted it, and shouted it with more desperation than anger, in a way he didn’t fully understand was honestly terrified of. 

Ada covered her face with her hand for a minute. Then she turned around. “Karl, sweetie, go in the bedroom right now, okay?”

“No,” said the little voice rebelliously.

“Karl. I need you to go.”

“I’ll fight him.” And Karl’s dark eyes regarded Tommy with as much suspicion and enmity as the tiny soul could muster.

“He looks so much like you,” said Tommy dryly.

“Stay here,” said Ada, and then she put the revolver on the kitchen table, lifted Karl up bodily, and deposited him in the bedroom, out of sight. When she returned, she had relaxed a little.

“What do we have to stop?” Tommy said gently.

“Everything. This.” She gestured between him and her. “Putting ourselves above other people. Thinking we’re better than other people.”

“This is not--”

“Are you paying for doctors for the other hundreds of men with Spanish flu, Tommy? What about the other soon-to-be widows with their little Karls? Are you paying off their debts? No. Of course not.”

“They’re not family,” he burst out.

“Family is arbitrary.”

“Family is all we have.”

“And that’s the kind of thinking that kills orphans.” She stood back and made a gesture, as if what she’d said was self-evident.

Tommy rubbed his face and tried to understand. “Ada, how does any of this...the world will always be like this. You know it will always be like this. Why does it have to be like this for you?”

“Because things won’t change until we do. Because I can’t believe that everyone deserves help and then turn around and ask for special treatment from you. Especially from you. ‘He won’t find out.’” Ada shook her head. “You think this grudge between us is because of Freddie? No, we’re not just united in name, we’re together in everything. Including a strong desire to keep Karl’s life unpolluted by either the family business or you.” Her eyes were perfectly steady. Her mouth, so often a lovely, laughing thing, was a thin line.

He had always harbored a secret suspicion that Freddie had been an act of rebellion, that once Ada had a taste of extreme hardship, and had known herself to be an independent woman, and had become a mother, that things would turn around, and he could have her back in Birmingham where she belonged. But this, whatever it was. This ideology. It ran deep, and had poisoned the entire well. When he said, “I love you, Ada,” it was a cry of defeat as much as anything else.

She didn’t bend an inch. “I love you too, Tommy. You’re my brother, and I’ll always love you. But you’re what’s killing us. My real family. The workers who have never hurt a man in their lives, except maybe in the war, when they had no other choice. And my real family has not only my love, but also my loyalty." She stepped forward. "I’m sorry about Esme, but it’s time for you to leave.” Quick as a whip, Ada removed his hand from the door and shut it once more in his face.

Tommy stood stewing in all the arguments he knew wouldn’t work. Then he hit the door. There was no point to it; he had simply needed to hit something for three days straight.

Ada kicked the door in answer. 

After a few minutes of silence, Tommy wiped his eyes and left. On his way out, he dropped off a cheque for £200 in Ada’s landlord’s office, along with a note. Then he caught a cab.

“I’ll pay you double,” he said, “if you can get me to the station in time for the 10:30.”

“Sure thing," said the cabbie. "Where are you headed?”

“Birmingham.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  
> 
>  
> 
> But nope. I'm still here. Still struggling away. If I have any excuse for the time it took me to finish this chapter, it is this: I love A Battle Joined, and I am genuinely trying my best to execute it as well as it deserves. Also, this chapter is 14,000+ words long.
> 
> Allow me to be shameless for a moment: comments give me the energy to carry on, so:
> 
>  


	3. fate/fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THEN • The return of an old enemy causes considerable turmoil in Esme’s life.
> 
> NOW • In pain, Tommy makes a rash choice.

 

  

 

** PART I. WHAT HAPPENED TO MRS. SHELBY? (CONTINUED) **

**THEN • 1921 • ESME**  

** NOW • 1923 • TOMMY **

 

 

**NOW**

Tommy limped through the back alley to the Watery Lane house on memory alone; the moon, at its thinnest, had been all but eclipsed by clouds, which sent a light rain to earth and turned the alley pitch black. When he was only a few minutes away, and could picture the little back door with its dull brass handle in its place in the darkness ahead of him, the rain suddenly became a full downpour, getting in his eyes, puddling in his shoes, and slicking his shirt as close as if it was a second skin.

He fumbled with the key on both sides of the door. Once he had locked it behind him, he shoved the keys back in his pocket and made a beeline for the kitchen in the dark, feeling for the cabinet handle and then finding the half-empty bottle of whiskey. Finally, he sat himself down at the kitchen table, in the dark, coat on, hat on, shoes on, and had himself a drink straight from the bottle while the rainwater and blood mixed in a puddle beneath him.

He’d be embarrassed if anyone saw this, likely, with injuries no worse than a shallow cut on the abdomen and a sprained ankle, but fuck, it had not been a pretty night and there was no one left to see that his wreckage was worse than could be accounted for by body alone.

Tommy worked the coat off his shoulders, soaked wool thick and unwieldy, then rummaged through its pockets for his cigarettes, still dry in their holder, and his lighter. He lit a cigarette. The exhale, long and slow, soothed him. So did the familiar orange glow that accompanied the smoke.

A quick bandage and a quantity of whiskey later, and he was ready. He called once a day at least. He was beginning to despair of ever getting an answer. Likely, he would likely have to go back up to London and threaten that Wilkes woman again, but that would be tiresome and fuck he was tired enough already.

He hauled himself up out of the chair, walked over to the office, and leaned on the desk, dialing the number he’d memorized, waiting impatiently for it to ring out.

This time, someone picked up.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice, tentative. Fucking hell. He hadn’t prepared for this. He hastily tried to make his voice as unthreatening as possible.

“Hello, is this Ms. Lee?”

Her cautious tone turned decidedly grim. “No, but give me one moment. Rupa!”

There was a bit of a scuffling sound, and then a new woman was at the phone.

“Yes? Is this Tommy?” She was making an effort to sound light, very unsuccessfully.

It was odd, hearing someone call him that when he’d never met them before, had no idea what they even looked like. But still. “Yes.”

“You scared Maisie half to death, I hear. Threatening to cut her up if I didn’t talk to you within the week.”

“My apologies.” He wasn’t sorry. “She was being...uncooperative.”

“What did you expect her to be like, with a man breaking into her house?”

“Usually that makes people more cooperative.”

“Have a lot of experience with break-ins, is it?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

She paused a moment, shifted, became far more direct. Now her voice was more familiar; it was decidedly not Esme’s, but you could hear how they were sisters in it. “What do you want?”

“I went to London to find Esme. She and I had an arrangement. She was supposed to let me know that she was still alive, and she didn’t. So I’ve been making inquiries.”

It took Rupa altogether too long to answer that. “What do you want to know?”

“When was the last time you heard anything about her?”

“I can’t remember exactly.”

“Try.”

Rupa sighed. “A man came looking for her, six months ago. Said she had disappeared.”

“Luther Sutton?”

“Yes.”

He could practically taste the reluctance coming off her. “What exactly did he say?”

“I can’t remember. He wasn’t much of a talker.”

“Did he seem guilty?”

“Why do you care?”

“I want to know what happened to her. I want to know if he happened to her.”

“He came himself, and only weeks after she’d gone. You’re in Birmingham, calling me seven months later.”

“Enough.” Tommy didn’t need any more of that from her, had plenty of it already. It was nearly intolerable to talk about Esme at all, and to talk about the telegrams, which were in their own way intensely private, was even worse, but he did it. He explained the system.

“Do you see?” he said when he was done, hoping this would mollify her.

“Yes, I see.” She said it terribly flatly. She didn’t seem placated at all. If anything, she sounded more unhappy than before.

“So can you tell me now?”

Rupa sighed. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

Tommy pushed off the desk and settled into the chair behind it. He lit a cigarette. It seemed to take her a moment to figure out where to begin.

“I would have told you before,” she said. “I would have called you. She gave me your number, in case of an emergency.”

He didn’t have enough whiskey in the house for this.

Rupa went on: “But I thought you already knew. I thought you had her killed.”

Tommy exhaled slowly. “Is she dead, then?”

“I don’t know.”

Due to the distance, he couldn’t press her, couldn’t afford to scare her off. He had to allow the silence, as much as he loathed it.

“Let me start at the beginning,” she said. “Esme called me about a couple weeks before she disappeared, all excited. She said she’d saved enough money to pay back the Favells for the robbery Dad pinned on them. I didn’t believe her. Nobody could make that kind of money with that kind of work. I thought she’d stolen it. Maybe stolen it from you.”

Tommy felt the expectant pause, but said nothing. Esme had money when she left, but Shelby money matters were none of her sister’s concern.

“But the way she talked,” Rupa went on, “she wasn’t happy. She was trying to make a change. She wanted to move to France, and of course I told her she could stay with us as long as she wanted—Paige and I, I mean—” And how odd, Tommy thought, that this woman could talk about her lover this simply and matter-of-factly, but perhaps that was France. “—but she said she wanted to get her own place, and she wanted Dad to come. She had me ask Dad, on her behalf, to come down to London and meet with the Favells on neutral ground, to offer an apology.”

“What neutral ground?”

“I didn’t ask for details. I thought it was ridiculous from top to bottom. They’d never forgive Dad. I knew it had been hard on her, when Dad left, and she was alone to carry the dishonor. Maybe it made her foolish. I thought Dad would see that, but he was just as wrong as she was about it. He went to London two days before she disappeared. And then they were both gone. I thought they had robbed you to pay back the Favells and finance the French house, but apparently not.”

Esme’s father? Fucking hell. Tommy wished he’d brought another pack of cigarettes with him; his last had gone on so long that it singed his fingers and had to be put out in the ashtray.

“Do you have any family friends in London, anyone that—”

“No. Dad had been in France with me, so we didn’t know anyone there, really. None of the other sisters lived there, either. And we’ve avoided other Romani. It’s better that way.”

“Right.”

“I spoke to her only once. Then I spoke to Dad once. He came to the flat before he left and brought his dog, so Paige would look after it. But that is all I know.”

“All right.”

“If you find either of them alive, tell them to come and take the dog. If you find either of them dead, I don’t need the ashes. But call me.”

“I will,” Tommy said.

She hung up.

Right. He was out of whiskey and didn’t have cigarettes at hand. He could detach, but there was work to be done.

Returning to the kitchen, he turned the lamp on, fetched needle and thread and sat once again at the table, stitching himself up. The chest-seizing sensation of the needle piercing his skin was enough to wholly occupy his mind, and by the time he had finished it up neatly with a clean white bandage, he felt nearly numb. There were thoughts—always thoughts—but he felt very little aside from the continuing dull ache in his ankle and the sharper ache in his abdomen. Though it was well past midnight, he ate a ploughman’s lunch as he went over the weekly shop report.

He very much wanted to go to bed, but if he let the puddle stay on the wood of the kitchen floor, it might stain, and he’d catch hell from Polly for that. He fetched the old mop from the back closet and returned. Blood had turned the puddle dark and nearly opaque against the wood of the floorboards. In fact a little trickle of blood was traveling very slowly down the leg of the chair and into the puddle, where it curled in little eddies and whorls, then dissipated, slowly. Finally there was no more blood, and no more patterns, just a still, shining liquid.

Tommy stopped staring. He put the mop down, turned, and went for the telephone.

“Charlie?”

“Of course it’s me, who else would be answering?” Tommy’s uncle replied, voice thick with sleepiness. “Fuck’s sake, what time is it?”

“Listen to me. I need to take a boat to London tomorrow morning. And I need you in it.”

“Can’t you take a fucking train? Or at least take Curly instead?”

“No.” Tommy hesitated, then added: “I’m expecting to have cargo on the way back.”

This time, he hung up first.

 

 

 

 

 

**THEN**

_Bang._

Esme opened her eyes, hoping beyond hope to find her room still dark. But no, beyond the half-curtain of her own hair in her face, she saw plenty of warm early sunlight slanting through the window, and besides, she could hear the high-pitched chirping of a couple little black starlings perched outside on the sill.

“Oi.” Without looking, she knew it was Tommy. He kicked the door again, for emphasis.

She groaned. “I know.”

“Then?”

They both know that if he left then and there, with Esme still horizontal, he’d return in a minute only to find her asleep again. Flinging the old green blanket aside, she sat up in bed, turned, and fixed him with a narrow-eyed look of mock anger.

Tommy imitated a yawn, which in turn made her yawn, enormously. His lips twitched.

“Fuck off.”

Tommy did. Or at least he went back to his room, door still open. She could hear him moving around in there, opening closet doors, choosing clothes, getting dressed.

Esme shook her head, got up, and began to dress too. She was smiling, but likely that was the sleepiness.

“To this day, I don't know why I fucking married you,” she muttered.

“Your mistake,” he called back.

“Everyone makes foolish mistakes when they’re young.”

“Is that what you call twenty-seven, sweetheart?”

“Younger than you, darling.”

Esme waited for the next retort, but it never came. Mildly concerned, she wandered across the hall into his room, combing her hair all the while, to find Tommy rifling through his closet, back bare, trousers on, suspenders hanging from them in loops.

He must have heard her footsteps, because without turning round to see her, he said, “Where’s my blue shirt?”

Technically, he had three different blue shirts, but she knew exactly which one he was talking about. “It’s dead. I cannibalized it for dust rags.”

He made a noise of disgust. “Chin Li Foo could’ve got the stains out.”

“Chin’s a professional launderer, not a magician. It was nearly white, and you had blood all up the front. Here.” She reached around him and plucked a perfectly good, relatively unwrinkled white shirt off the rack.

Tommy didn’t look pleased, but put the shirt on as he was told. Esme walked into the hall, threw her comb on her bed through the open door, and headed downstairs, braiding her hair as she went.

Now fully awake, she reflected that on the whole, they were doing oddly well. She had expected some difference after last night’s conversation, a slight withdrawal on his part, perhaps, but for all the world he seemed as if nothing had happened. Perhaps that was withdrawal in its own way. Well, good. She was more than happy to mutually refuse acknowledging that anything had happened.

She put their old copper kettle on the stove for a morning cup of tea, then put on a pot of water and a few eggs to boil for a quick breakfast. A bit of toast would be nice with that. Now, didn’t they have half a loaf left from John’s kids’ baking spree a few days ago? Yes, there it was.

No. Even if they never spoke of it again, and even if he never thought of it again, Esme couldn’t forget it. She could still vividly remember the feeling of the moment, the cold of the night air on her skin after she left the bed, the low rasp in his voice and the expression on his face when he said, _So this is it?_ Weary and vulnerable. _I’m asking._

Perhaps Esme had made a mistake. She had made her reply in panic, mostly, knowing that she was exhausted and sentimental herself, knowing that the bed’s shared warmth and weight of understanding him had weakened her…

No. She closed her eyes. No, it had not been a mistake. The wavering she felt was only a human exhaustion.

By the time Tommy got to the kitchen fifteen minutes later with his gun in his shoulder holster and the morning newspaper in his hand, Esme had already finished her tea and toast and eggs, left his on the table, and moved on to washing up some dishes from the night before. Upon finishing the dishes, Esme interrupted Tommy’s article on the Newmarket racing prospect by putting a little brown bag on the table.

“What’s this?”

“Egg salad sandwich, apple, leftover gingerbread. Might be careful of the gingerbread; Katie’s a liberal cook, especially ginger. She says she hates boring food. _Detests_ it. She talks like she ate a dictionary sometimes.”

Tommy looked up at her. “You made me lunch?”

“Might not have time for it later,” Esme said, as if that was an adequate explanation. It wasn’t, and they both knew it wasn’t, but she found she could only shrug.

“I’m seeing Polly before work today,” she said. And fled.

 

 

 

 

 

**NOW**

“Tommy! What a wonderful surprise!”

Alfie sauntered into the room smelling of rum and down to his shirtsleeves, sheened with sweat and clearly just off a bit of work. Tommy found himself sitting up slightly and awakening too. It was not unlike the reaction one might have to being in the presence of a large bear restrained by only a rusty chain. Any other day, and he would have hailed the challenge with pleasure, but just then, he found it nothing but a trial. He would play along, but he knew himself to be in such a weak position that there was no joy in it.

“Sit down, sit down.” Alfie waved a hand at him and plopped down into his own seat behind the desk. “Wot is this, Buckingham Palace? Are you standing on ceremony, mate?”

“I can only stay for a minute, Alfie,” Tommy said, as lightly as he could.

“A right shame, that, cause you could’ve stayed for lunch. There’s a leg of mutton would melt your tongue, Tommy, melt it right out of your mouth. But I understand.” He made a generous, expansive gesture with both hands. “Business is business.”

Tommy settled into the proffered chair and lit a cigarette. Then, with a slow exhale, he looked at Alfie expectantly.

“I’ve been hearing you’re having some troubles, innit,” said Alfie. “The Chinese?” And his face creased into a grin. “Fuck’s sake, Tommy, if you can’t handle them…” He shook his head. “And what’s this about you losing your temper?”

“You’d better check your sources, Alfie. You’re behind on the news.”

“I’m behind, is it?” Alfie was still grinning with his mouth at least, if not with his eyes.

“We’ve more than answered that rebellion. With force.”

“Mm.” Alfie appeared to be considering that. Then, abruptly, he repeated: “And what’s this about you losing your temper?”

“You know how it is, Alfie,” Tommy said. “People can forget who you are if you leave them alone long enough.” He leaned back in his chair and regarded the man opposite with flat eyes. His voice went down a few notes. “Sometimes they need a reminder.”

Alfie took that in, unsmiling. Suddenly, he broke out into a laugh, mad and real at the same time, finger pointing at Tommy in some sort of discovery. “You haven’t killed anyone lately, ‘ave you, Tommy?” Not just discovery, triumph. “I can see it. I can see it.” He stopped laughing. “You’re like my dog, is what you are. Sometimes I have to go on business and I have to leave him locked up in the house for a few days, right? By the time I get back, he’s scratching up the doors, desperate to get out. He’s torn the place to pieces. But you’re a businessman now, innit, and you’re not in Birmingham. Not in the kingdom anymore, so you gotta be civilized. No clawing up the sofa cushions for you. No impulsive little manslaughters. All you can do is sit there and look at me with those fucking eyes.”

Alfie tsked sympathetically. “Poor puppy. Here.” And up out of the drawer came the eternal whiskey bottle. “‘ave yourself a drink.” Alfie filled the little glass generously. Tommy didn’t touch it.

“I didn’t come to talk killing, Alfie.”

“Then why the fuck are you here, mate?”

Tommy took a breath. Already he was wearing thin, and they hadn’t even got through this halfway. Jesus. “It has come to my attention—”

“Oh, fuck me, this one will be good,” Alfie rumbled.

Tommy paused.

“No, go on. Go on.” Alfie put a beringed hand on his chest. “My apologies.”

“It has come to my attention that someone has been fucking about with the London racetrack numbers.”

“Oh?”

“For example. The July takings were roughly two thousand, four hundred and forty pounds. Now, your share at thirty-five percent is eight hundred and fifty-four. Yet our share for the month was put at one thousand, five hundred and four.”

“Sounds like you’re down a few pounds there, mate. No harm done, I’ll get Ollie to sort it out. Must have been mistake.”

“The month before that, the Derby. Biggest month of the year. The numbers worked out perfectly.”

“There you go.”

“But in May, your share exceeded your share by another fifty-seven pounds. Fifty-seven pounds and eleven shillings, to be precise.”

They eyed each other over the full glass. Suddenly, Alfie smiled. “Oh, let’s be fuckin’ precise,” he murmured. “Absolutely. If you’re going to call me a thief, then let’s have it all the way down to a farthing.”

Tommy blew a faint curl of white smoke into the air.

“This is ridiculous. ‘ow do you know it’s not _your_ man that made the mistake, eh? Answer me that.”

“I rewrote all the calculations myself, Alfie. Double-checked.”

“In your head, is it?”

“And on paper.” Tommy produced a file from his briefcase. It contained copies of all the relevant figures, as well as a several irrelevant (but accurate) figures, just to give Alfie something to do.

“Mm.” Alfie grunted and took the file without looking inside it. “I’ll have a look and get back to you, how’s that?”

“When you find who made the mistake, and I am confident that you will, it may be a matter of mismanagement and not of malice.”

“That’s very fucking generous of you, mate.”

“It won’t affect the terms of our agreement. The past shares will be corrected, of course, but besides that, your percentage moving forward will remain the same.”

“If there is a mistake.”

“However, we will discuss an additional agreement regarding the shipment of certain goods through the Surrey Commercial Docks to America under the auspices of the lumber—”

“Hold on—”

“I hadn’t finished.” Tommy’s voice had gone so quiet, it was almost gentle. “Did you want me to finish?”

“Just wanted to point out that you’ve got your geography mixed up there, mate. Rotherhithe is south of the Thames. Not my territory. But go on with your requests.” Alfie spread his hands in an expansive gesture. “Why not?”

“The shipment negotiations can wait until our accounts are settled. In the meantime, I need to talk to your sources within the Metropolitan Police.”

Alfie made a sound halfway between tsk and cluck, like a disapproving mother or an angry hen. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, Thomas. The police are not to be trusted.”

“Yeah, well, people change. They adapt. And in the absence of Darby Sabini, you have cultivated contacts at the very top, haven’t you? Possibly all the way to Commissioner Horwood. I do hear the old Brigadier General is very fond of military men.”

“Have you been spying on me, mate? Me?” Alfie’s eyes were as dead serious as they had ever been, but he made a little noise of incredulousness at the back of his throat to test the waters.

Tommy, however, was in no mood to play. “I’m only taking your advice, Alfie. I would hate for intelligence to come too late this time.”

“Mm. All right, you tell me what you need from them, and I’ll let them know. Save everyone the trouble of a meeting, since you’re in such a fucking hurry.”

“I only need an introduction.”

“No, no. I insist.” Alfie smiled the smile of a man who just placed a bet on a fixed race.

This was the last person on earth that Tommy could bear talking to (and, by necessity, lying to) about this. Or no, that was Polly. The last man on earth, then. Yet here he was. “There is a man named Sidney Lee, about sixty-four years old, a little over six feet tall. Brown hair, brown eyes. Uses a silver-headed cane. He may be with a his daughter, Eliza Lee, twenty-nine years old. Five feet two.” For a sliver of a second, Tommy allowed himself to feel relief. To his own ears, the words had come out smoothly.

Alfie, however, was unimpressed. “What do you expect? Do you want them to stop every tall old man with a cane and a daughter within thirty miles of the city?”

“No, they’re likely dead. The police will have easiest access to morgue records from the past eight months. I want copies for every man or woman that matches those descriptions.”

“And why do these people matter?”

“They’re Romani. Old family friends.”

Alfie had stopped smiling, was not even trying to twist the knife. His expression had become so neutral it was almost polite, which made it all the worse. He certainly knew what Tommy was doing. But he was withholding, which Tommy had rarely known Alfie to ever do without concealed motives. He was wearing satin gloves where he could have wielded a tire iron. What was it, pity? Fuck, let it not be that. Let it be another betrayal, then. Let it be what Tommy was well used to. He was losing his ability to read the man. He was losing everything.

“I thought I recognized the name Lee,” was all Alfie said.

“Yes. I owe one of them a favor.” Tommy reached into his pocket, gave his pocket watch a perfunctory glance, and stood to leave. Maybe it was clear that he was fleeing. Maybe he didn’t care.

He didn’t make it to the door.

“I am touched that you came here to me with personal business, Tommy. Truly. Despite your accusations that I’m cheating you, that shows a real trust. Very fucking gratifying.”

One last threat it was, then. He turned. “Well, Alfie,” he said, blue eyes meeting green ones, voice velvet, “As long as our business prospers, we prosper.”

For a moment, neither man so much as breathed. When tried to walk out again, Alfie shouted after him, “Oi! You didn’t touch your drink!” so Tommy came back to the desk in three long strides, lifted the glass to his lips, and drank down its contents without stopping until it was empty. He put the glass upside down on the desk.

Then he left. He expected Alfie to call after him a third time, and was supremely grateful when he didn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

**THEN**

As Esme walked briskly through the gray streets of Birmingham, she could feel the way the city had changed for her. When she had first come to the city, she had to go everywhere with Arthur or John or in a car, but now, she could nearly walk as if she was a man. She could at least walk Lucy home after work with almost no incident.

One drunk, feeling particularly bold in the shadows of the evening and in the comfort of walking with six or seven others, called out to her, but all it took from Esme was a step closer to a streetlight to shut him up; he got one look at her face and fled, and the whole group with him.

That would have been enjoyable, was it not for Lucy flinching. At only twenty-four years old, the girl had spent several years in and out of brothels, but she still sometimes enjoyed the world in a bright, almost childlike way that Esme couldn’t help but feel protective of. She’d promised Lizzie that she would look after Lucy initially, but it had taken her all of two or three days to decide, entirely independently of the obligation, that she would have taken the girl under her wing anyway. It felt natural. Remembering what Ada had said to her earlier, Esme wondered if this was what motherhood felt like. Perhaps that was why, despite a overwhelming sense of weariness from the sleepless night before, she tried to make a little small talk. Lucy had been quiet and almost cross the whole day, so Esme steeled herself for unpleasantness.

“How’s Jimmy?” Esme asked.

“Oh, he’s doing well. He can read a little now.”

To anyone else, that would pass for polite conversation, but Lucy, like most mothers, was a woman completely unable to speak of her son as briefly as all that. Any other day, and Esme would be treated to three anecdotes and a full syllabus of all the books he’d gotten through, but today, silence.

It was genuinely strange, the way this felt comforting rather than worrying. Perhaps Esme had spent too much time with the Shelby family, but it felt good to be talking to someone that was too honest to hide it when there was something wrong. Esme went right in for the most obvious potential worry: “His father’s still in prison, right?”

Lucy had this trick of letting her pale blonde hair fall like a curtain between her face and the face of anyone looking at her. She used it to infuriating effect. “Yes. He’ll be there for years yet.”

“Good,” said Esme decisively.

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Beg pardon?”

Lucy glanced over. Esme quirked an eyebrow at her and repeated, “What’s the problem?”

“Just thinking about today’s work. I’ve been checking Arthur’s figures. It can be difficult.”

“Yes, they can be quite dazzling,” Esme said dryly. “But that’s not news. Unless they’re suddenly much worse?”

“No.”

“Then what’s gotten into you?”

Lucy chewed her bottom lip.

Esme raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t think Polly likes me,” Lucy burst out.

“Oh, is that all?” Esme tried her best not to smile; Lucy looked terribly worried. “That’s not exceptional, you know. Polly loves very few people, and likes even fewer.”

“No, I think she doesn’t like me. Me especially.”

“She has a talent for making people feel like that. Does it really worry you so much?”

“She’s half-head of the company, and I’d rather keep my job than not.”

“Shelby Company Limited is split evenly between the brothers,” said Esme.

“On paper. But Polly gives half the orders.”

Esme smiled. The little bird did have a pair of eyes, and she used them too. Good. “You’re not stupid, incompetent, disloyal, or malicious, so you have nothing to fear from her. The worst she’d do to you is say a few things in a temper. And even then, I’m more likely in her line of fire than you. She’s had a hard time of it, so she’s been worse these past weeks. But you’ll be fine.”

“What if I was disloyal?”

“I’d be fucking surprised.” But for the first time, Esme began to take Lucy’s worries seriously.

“I’m not a snitch, it’s just...if Polly is half the head of the company, then Tommy is the other half, right?”

“He imagines the hierarchy otherwise. But you’re right. You’re exactly right.”

“So what happens if one of them tells you to do something the other doesn’t want?”

Esme considered that. “If it’s me? Then I’m fucked. If it’s you, tell me, and I’ll handle it.” Esme could see that this did not quite have a soothing effect, so she added: “They’re always at odds with words, but they always want the same outcomes. They want what’s best for the family. So from there it’s just a matter of tactics. What is it that you’re afraid to do for Polly?”

Lucy took a deep breath and told Esme her problem. Any triumph that Esme might have felt at the success of her dogged levity immediately disappeared. “Polly told me to tell her if there were ever calls or correspondence from a woman named Grace Burgess. Or Grace Macmillan.”

Now that was an unexpected blow. “Which name did she use?”

“Grace Burgess.”

“Was it a call or a letter?”

“A call I put through to him two days ago. He might have got a letter. Sometimes he gets his own mail.”

Suddenly last night’s conversation took on a far more sinister connotation. _So this is it? I’m asking._ Last call, except he hadn’t had the decency to fucking tell her that. Maybe May Carleton was supposed to be a proxy for Grace, but she wasn’t half close, in meaning or in threat, so it wasn’t a fair way to ask her that question. But why ask fairly? That fucker.

Esme stewed in her thoughts until suddenly Lucy stopped walking. Looking up at the massive tenement houses around them, towering up in dirty brick, Esme realized they’d reached Lucy’s little flat. Lucy had mustered a cheery smile and was waving; from nine stories up, Jimmy pressed his little nose to the smudged window and waved back.

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell Polly about it for you,” was all Esme said.

“And what if she lets him know that I talked about his private conversations?”

“Polly has more sense than that.”

Lucy lingered on the front doorstep to her building, looking as anxious as a child on their first day of school. Esme felt for her. She remembered what it had been like at first, entering the Shelby world. All the snide comments, and the inside jokes, and the darker acts taking place out of the corner of her eye—

“I can’t go back,” Lucy said, looking down at her purse, her shoes, and then Esme knew this was about things far worse than she’d experienced. “I was never any good at it the first place. Even before Robert, Lizzie used to try to teach me things to make it go better, and it didn’t. It never went any better.” Lucy seemed to be gathering speed, as if saying the words faster would take away the sting of them. “I am grateful for this work, I’m so grateful, but I seem to be no good at this either. If it’s going to—”

“Shut up and listen,” Esme said. She put her hands on Lucy’s shoulders and looked directly in her gray eyes. “There’s always secrets and trouble in this family. Always. You will never know everything that is going on. Think about it this way: Polly is closer to Tommy than anyone else in the entire fucking family, and she still needed you to spy on him. You, right? You really do strike me as a shit spy.”

Lucy couldn’t help but crack a smile at that. “Yes.”

“So it’s foolish to think you’ll ever entirely know what’s going on. If Polly can’t do it, no one can. But as long as you do the work they ask you to do, and as long as you’re willing to handle some unexpected circumstances, you don’t have anything to worry about from them, all right? And you won’t go back to the old days, I won’t allow it. Just do the work, and you’ll be fine. I promise.”

Lucy gave a solemn nod. Suddenly, she lurched forward and threw her around round Esme in a fierce bear hug. “Okay,” she mumbled into Esme’s shoulder. Esme, not knowing what else to do, hugged back. It was nice, actually. It was warm. When was the last time she’d held anybody? Ada, maybe? That felt like a lifetime ago. There was no use trying to talk, anyway, with her face full of blonde curls.

After a minute, Esme gave Lucy one last pat on the back and then extricated herself. “Say hello to Jimmy for me,” she said. She didn’t know what else there to say.

“I will.” Lucy was beaming with relief. “Goodnight, Esme.”

“Goodnight.”

 

When the door swung open and Esme found herself staring down the empty black eye of a revolver, she decided not to take it personally.

“Sorry I’m so late,” she said. “I brought whiskey, if that helps.”

Polly lowered the weapon after a significant pause. “I have my own.”

“I know. But the more the merrier.” Esme brushed past her and took off her shoes before Polly could object, flinging herself into one big floral-patterned armchair. “Do you have a corkscrew?”

Polly locked the door, reached into her pocket, and then flung a corkscrew at Esme, though with half-drunk aim, so that it bounced off the wall and landed by chance on the sideboard. “Don’t you carry one?” she said.

“No.” Esme collected the corkscrew and got to work. “Is this another of your Shelby family traditions?”

“Oh yes,” said Polly dryly, leaning on the arm of the sofa, not quite sitting. “We drink. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Carrying corkscrews everywhere, I meant.”

“I don’t know about the boys, but I do. Helps with the drinking.”

There was a bottle, nearly empty, tipped on its side atop the piano. Esme saw it out of the corner of her eye, and longed to right it. Polly in any other state wouldn’t have her house like this. Had she even slept since Campbell? Esme took a swig straight from the newly-opened bottle of whiskey.

“You can stop feeling sorry for me now,” Polly said.

Fucking hell, talk about uncanny. Maybe Polly was a witch after all.

“I mean it,” Polly continued as she sat down on the sofa. Somehow, she managed to be elegant even while slouching. “Well done. You can now tell yourself you came to see if I was all right.”

Esme gave her a look. “And are you all right?”

“Yes. Now go home. I can tell you haven’t slept. One of us should get some fucking sleep.”

“Us?”

“You, me, Tommy. I know he’s not sleeping.”

There wasn’t much she could say to that, was there. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” Esme said. She scanned the room, taking in the décor. “Rearranged the furniture, changed out the drapes.”

Polly made a little _chuh_ sound of disgust. “Go, and take your pity with you.” After a moment’s thought, she added, “You can leave the whiskey behind.”

Esme craned her neck and peered out the windows. “Are those rose bushes outside? Tommy did say you like gardening.”

Polly took a long drink. “When you get home, tell him to fuck off, from me.”

“Every day of my life. But for what, this time?”

“For sending me such a boring babysitter.”

“I’m not a babysitter, and I haven’t been sent.”

“Why can’t you get out of my fucking house?”

“What if I promise not to talk?”

“What the use in you if you don’t talk?”

“You never see the use in me even when I’m talking.”

“Mm.” That wasn’t a yes to Esme’s question, but it wasn’t a no either, so they both drank in silence as the fire began to burn out.

Some rest was good, Esme decided. Grace could wait. Arthur could wait. Everything else could wait. Let Polly just have a minute to sit on her own sofa, in her own house, with a locked door. Esme drank cautiously, a few sips at a time, but Polly drank like she was on a mission, revolver still in hand, extra bottle in her lap. Esme couldn’t help but notice that.

“Can I—” she began.

“You said you wouldn’t talk.” Instead of using her finger to point, Polly used the revolver.

Esme flinched. “Can I have a turn at holding the gun?”

Polly lowered it. “Why?”

“I’m less drunk. And you might get some sleep that way. It’s hard to sleep while holding onto a gun.”

“How would you know?”

Esme just opened and closed her hand a few times in the universal _give me_ gesture. Polly sighed, which Esme took as a _fine_ , so Esme got up and gingerly took the gun from her, sitting back down at the far end of the sofa. When she glanced back at Polly, Polly was cutting her eyes at her.

“What?”

“Give me the gun back.” Polly extended her hand. “You look like Katie with that thing in your lap. You look ridiculous. Do you even know how to aim?”

“I have killed a man, you know.”

“That was beginner’s luck. Give it back.”

Suddenly, the angle at which Polly had sat herself on the sofa made a lot more sense.

“No, look. Look.” Esme put her bottle down, sat up, turned to face the front door, and laid her gun-holding arm on the arm of the sofa, as if she really did expect a man to come in at any moment. “Better?”

“You still look ridiculous,” Polly said, but she didn’t move.

When the quiet stretched long, it was all Esme could do to keep her eyes open. She knew that if she fell asleep, Polly would never forgive her, so she set her thoughts to wandering, weaving in and out of Grace and Polly and Campbell and Tommy and whether or not, in the end, she’d be able to secure the deed to the Black Patch, until about half an hour in, Esme heard a soft sound from Polly’s end of the sofa. In a few minutes, that evolved into a full-fledged snore.

Sometime far after midnight, Polly rolled over and tucked her cold toes under Esme’s leg. She looked peaceful when she slept in a way that Esme had never seen her look before, and that was a reward well worth another night spent sitting up. The fire burned down to embers, but the room stayed warm.

At a little after two, with her eyes still open, Esme had almost entirely submerged herself in a fantasy about riding her mare along a thin trail in the woods, a couple shot rabbits hanging off the saddle behind her, the comfort of a bonfire in her near future. She was just trying to decide what herbs she’d use to season the roast, when suddenly, she heard soft footsteps on the stairs. She had no time. She took aim. A man paused on the second-to-last step, face lost to the nighttime shadows.

“Go ahead,” he said softly.

It was Michael.

Esme swore and put the gun down. “I’m sorry, she didn’t tell me that you were here.”

“Yeah.” He paused, then turned around and began to go back upstairs.

“Wait, what did you need?”

Silence. The shadows didn’t stir.

“Michael,” Esme called, daring to be a little louder. Polly, thankfully, kept snoring.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“If you don’t talk to me, I’ll wake up your mother and ask her.”

“She needs to sleep.”

“I agree.”

Footsteps again. This time, Michael came down the stairs and stepped into the living room. Esme swallowed hard. He had been beaten to pieces, that much was clear, but it wasn’t that which nearly made her heart stop; it was his left eye, swollen shut and nearly purple, with a cruel slash through the top eyelid. She should have expected this. She didn’t know what to say.

“I wanted a glass of water,” Michael said. “That’s all.” The longer she looked at him, the more his shoulders tensed, the more his lips tightened, the more he looked like his mother, defying her or anyone to pity him.

So all she said was, “Get me a glass too, while you’re at it.”

He spent an oddly long time in the kitchen, but ultimate emerged with a stony expression and the water she’d asked for.

“Thank you.”

Michael stepped back. He had his mother’s trick of staring at Esme in a way that she found mysteriously unsettling. “Campbell told me to tell you he’d see you again.”

Esme’s stomach dropped. “Good thing I have a gun.”

“Yeah.”

She knew she shouldn’t, but she said it anyway. “He wouldn’t have thought of this if I hadn’t taken out his eye last year. And he wouldn’t have been able to do it if I had killed him when I had the chance. So—I’m sorry this came back to you. You were the person in this family that deserved it the least.” It was impossible to tell if he heard a word she was saying, but she had to try. “You know, your mother was so happy when Tommy told her you were alive. I’d never seen her—”

“You know what?” Michael leaned in. Though his skin was riddled with evidence that he could be hurt, his expression held nothing but steel, and his voice was deliberate, like the voice of someone untouchable. “I think he likes you.”

Esme froze. Michael, for his part, turned away as if they had had nothing more than a conversation about the weather, and headed back up the stairs.

After a few minutes, Esme had to switch the gun to her left hand, to keep her right from cramping. She had held onto it that tightly. What had caused the boy to say something like that, she’d never understand; maybe it was what Polly would call the devil in him. But at least it had some use.

Esme didn’t find it half as difficult to stay awake after that.

 

 

 

 

 

**NOW**

If there wasn’t any news about Esme, then Tommy hoped Alfie at least had the fucking grace to make this an assassination attempt.

The lobby of the Langham gave him the impression that his wishes would come true. Adorned with tall white pillars, chandeliers dripping with crystal, intricately-patterned Oriental rugs, and hobble-skirted ladies giving him curious looks, not to mention trim-suited gentlemen giving him dour ones, the hotel made him feel as if he could hear the first distant whistle of the first shell. Some sort of strafe was on the fucking way. There was a sense of wrongness about the place that he didn’t usually feel when he visited somewhere truly neutral. Alfie didn’t belong there at all. Tommy didn’t belong there at all either.

He wished that someone would try and kill him already. It would be a relief.

“Tommy! Not waiting long, I hope,” called a familiar voice behind him.

Tommy closed his eyes. The other option, then. He wasn’t going to be killed.

Fuck, he hated it when Alfie told the truth.

“Why are we here?” he said. “Marylebone isn’t even in your territory.”

Alfie swung into the red armchair opposite Tommy with one of his characteristic unintelligible sounds, a noise that sounded vaguely conciliatory. “Thought you might like a touch of class, innit.” He gestured around at the general grandeur. “This fits the bill, doesn’t it.”

“We’ve had meetings in the basement of a distillery.”

Alfie tsked warningly. “The basement of a bakery. We’re in civilization now, Thomas, so mind your manners.”

Tommy’s stomach dropped. So that was why, was it? Civilization. Insurance against the possibility of Tommy losing control. All right. He knew now what this meeting was going to be in substance even if he didn’t know what form it would take. It would be nothing good. Get it over with.

Alfie returned Tommy’s stare with an everyday expression that gave nothing away. “D’you want something to drink, mate? I usually offer you something, don’t I. Oi!” Alfie gestured at a passing bellhop, a pinch-nosed, fair-haired boy who froze a moment and then began walking towards them with evident nervousness at dealing with such an ill-dressed man, a man with no luggage at that.

“Leave it,” Tommy said.

“No, you’re looking a bit sickly. You need a pick-me-up.” He turned to the boy. “What have you got here?”

“Rooms?” the bellhop stammered. “The restaurant is that way, sir.”

“Yeah, I know, right, but what I wanted to know is what kind of drinks they serve in this restaurant of yours. Have they got Irish whiskey?”

“Of course, sir. The Langham has everything. Can I—”

“No,” Tommy said quietly. Meeting the boy’s eyes, he dropped his voice down a few more notes and added: “Fuck off.”

Alfie made a sound of disapproval as the boy fled. “You didn’t have to do that. He was only little.”

“I told you to leave it.”

“And I told you to mind your manners, but here we are.”

Too tired to restrain himself, Tommy lapsed into a glare that skipped lightly over baleful and went straight to venomous. Alfie, without spite, held that glare.

“I don’t think traveling agrees with you, mate,” Alfie observed.

“It doesn’t.” Tommy used the process of producing and lighting a cigarette as an excuse to look away. “Do you have the file?”

“All I did was invite you for drinks at the hotel, right, so we could talk information. I never said—”

“Give me the fucking file.”

“What file?”

Tommy bit off each word, as if he was trying to space them out for the sake of a particularly dull child. “I want to see whatever information the police gave you.”

“And what makes you think I have a file?”

This was like having his fingernails pulled out. One by one. Slowly. Tommy set his teeth. “Because you know that without some fucking records, I wouldn’t believe a word you had to say.”

Alfie sat back and considered Tommy, arms on the armrests, looking for all the world like a king on his throne. His eyes were intolerably clear. “You still haven’t killed anyone since the last time we spoke, have you,” he said. “Better have that looked after, Tommy. You’re beginning to show symptoms.”

Tommy could hear the defeat in his own voice. “Just fucking do it, Alfie.” It was nearly a plea.

Alfie reached into the voluminous depths of his black coat, produced a file, and handed it over. Tommy picked laid it on his lap and began to flip through.

It began simply enough, with a report of a police scandal that had seen several cases of policemen pocketing valuable evidence. Investigations headed by Inspector Pendricks had yielded heaps of information on missing persons cases that had been stymied by the lack of these pieces of evidence. There were even newspaper clippings for that part. Then there was the paperwork concerning one such pawned valuable, a silver-headed cane. And a wedding ring, a simple gold band. And then there were the descriptions of the bodies, stark and brutal in their feature-by-feature descriptions.

It all fit. Every bit of information fit. There were things in this that he had not told Alfie, that Alfie could not have known. The paper said in clear black ink on faintly yellow paper that the dead woman had a small scar on the back of her neck. He knew that it must be true. He himself had seen the blood running crimson down her back, had watched with time as the wound scabbed and scarred pink and faded. He had smoothed the pad of his thumb over the scar, careful, and felt sharp pang of self-reproach for not having prevented it, small as it was, and he had wanted to kiss her because he had not known the words to an apology…

The wave engulfed him. He had known it was coming, and he was still powerless to prevent it. It could not be true that Esme was dead, it must not be true, couldn’t be, so he had to work his way backwards and find which wrong step had taken him to that false conclusion.

“This comes from George Goddard,” Tommy said. That was a self-evident flaw, wasn’t it?

“Station Sergeant of C Company, yes. Good old Georgie. He’s reliable, isn’t he. Very quick.”

“Very corrupt.”

Alfie made a faint sound of derision. “If the Metropolitan wasn’t a pack of rats, how would either of us get any information?”

“He’s a liar,” Tommy said evenly. “Like you.” He mustered the last of his strength and locked eyes with Alfie, mounting one last challenge: “Why should I trust this?”

“Tommy, sweetheart, this—” Alfie leaned forward and tapped the top paper twice. “This is real. I don’t know where you’ve gone in your pretty little head, but I know this is real. I didn’t take Goddard at his word, I’ve had it checked front to back. You can check it for yourself if you like, but I think you know this is real. You must have heard about the Pendricks scandal two months ago. You did, didn’t you?” He was a worse bully gentle than he was loud.

“Yes,” Tommy heard himself say.

“And the descriptions of the dead, they match your family friends, innit?”

“Yes.” His voice was nearly inaudible.

“And you know this is real, yeah?”

The cigarette had burned down and was beginning to blister Tommy’s fingertips. He dropped it onto one of the priceless hotel rugs and grabbed the papers instead, wrinkling some of them, slightly clumsy, the scrape of the file edge against one burnt fingertip sending a sharp protest of pain back to his mind. The pain registered as if it was a telegram from some foreign country. He bled a couple small drops onto the paper.

Alfie was saying something but Tommy didn’t hear it, was too busy standing and turning, maneuvering his way through the obstacle course of chairs and low tables and people, almost made it to the doors when he knocked into somebody so hard that it sent their luggage thudding to the ground, sent him one step backwards, jolted him enough to hear that Alfie was calling after him, but if he could only make it to the front doors, yes, yes, he rammed his shoulder hard into the heavy wood of a door and finally stood on the sidewalk, breathing in great gulps of warm fresh air full of the smell of fresh rain drying off the pavement, sticking his whole arm out for a cab like a boy on his first visit to the city, like he was only anxious that some cabbie might not see him, like he was someone else. Cheeks dry, cheeks dry, heart pounding. He had known this was going to happen. He had known this was going to fucking happen.

When he got into the cab, he was able to tug his cap down lower on his forehead and that was almost enough.

“Where to?” said the cabbie.

“South.”

“South where?”

“Just fucking drive,” Tommy said, voice thick.

 

Hours later, hours of driving, and calling, and one break-in, no, two, and an intolerable conversation, and he hadn’t eaten. He knew that he hadn’t eaten because when he got out of the cab this time, the last time, to get to his hotel, he moved too fast and his head spun and he had to grip the door handle a moment before he could keep going. He was very sure of what had happened and where he was going and he was going to hell. Before that, though, he had to eat. He didn’t mean to die yet.

He stalked into the hotel restaurant, almost entirely clear of people at 4:19 in the afternoon, and ordered a sandwich of beef tongue and a whiskey. The whiskey came fast but the sandwich took its sweet time. His eyes drifted over the dining room in all its dark-wooded, sandalwood-scented monotony, the empty tables after empty tables, and found one table occupied, there in the back corner, by the last tall window. Around the table sat two women and one dark-haired boy.

The boy couldn’t have been more than four, and he was staring openly at Tommy, so Tommy stared back. He was not trying to scare the boy but he knew his eyes must be hollow. The woman sitting next to the boy, who shared his snub nose and straight hair and therefore was likely his mother, paused in her conversation with the other woman a moment to see what her son was looking at. Seeing Tommy, she put her hand on her son’s shoulder with such an expression of protectiveness that Tommy looked down at the tablecloth. When he looked back again, the mother had resumed her conversation, and the boy was playing with the butter knife. The mother’s hand was still on the boy’s shoulder.

Tommy got up from the table and left without eating or paying. He did not wait for the elevator; he took the stairs to his room on the fifth floor. When he got into the room, it was filled with the warm golden glow of afternoon light coming in through the window. He locked the door behind him.

He took off his coat and cap and left them in a crumpled heap on the floor. He closed the heavy curtains against the intrusion of sunlight. He sat down on the bed. He—

 

 

 

 

 

**THEN**

Esme stifled a yawn and glanced up at the clock over the mantelpiece as Polly stirred on the sofa beside her. Nearly ten in the morning. Well, she was glad that Polly had gotten a decent rest, but if she was being honest, she was very glad it was over. Esme had taken to keeping herself awake by pinching her own arms, and even then, she kept drifting into grotesque half-dreams of Campbell lurching into the house, blood dripping onto the carpet from his empty eye socket.

Polly finally stretched out along the length of the sofa, inadvertently kicking Esme in the process, and then squinted up at her.

“What…” Polly murmured. A look of dismay burst onto her face and she sat up straight.

Esme spoke quickly. “I had Lizzie and John come over this morning, just half an hour ago. They took Michael to the eye specialist. Have some water.” Esme gestured to a full glass on the side table.

As Polly drank the whole thing, Esme all but held her breath. They were both used to Polly mothering every Shelby within reach, but to have any Shelby reciprocate was new territory.

Of course, leave it to Polly to be as brusque as usual, giving no indication whether she appreciated or resented Esme’s actions.

“Did you lock the door after Michael?”

“Of course,” said Esme.

“Did you pick up the mail?”

“John did. It’s on the kitchen table. And there’s half a roast from Lizzie in the icebox.”

“How was he?”

Addled with sleeplessness as Esme knew herself to be, she made a quick executive decision not to mention her short conversation with him the night before. She didn’t have it in her to describe how unsettling he’d been, and probably wouldn’t have been able to properly describe it even with twelve hours of sleep under her belt.

“Michael was a little quiet, but he didn’t seem out of sorts. Lizzie had a ham sandwich for him.”

“Could have made him eggs and sausage. There was some in the icebox.”

“She had no way of knowing what was in the icebox. Polly, we took care of him. He’s all right. Everything’s all right.”

Polly paused, and Esme all but held her breath. Then: “You can put the gun down now,” Polly said.

“Thank God. Thank your fucking Catholic Jesus God,” Esme sighed. She put the gun down on the coffee table, then began to massage her hands, left with the right, then right with the left. In the meantime, Polly began to make herself toast.

When the clock struck ten, Esme went over to the telephone and and dialed for Watery Lane.

“Shelby Limited, what can I do for you?”

“Lucy, it’s me. How is it?”

“We’re not so behind without you. It’s only been a few hours. And besides, I can stay late to make up the work.”

Any other day, and Esme would argue the point, but just then her body felt like it might collapse all on its own at any second. “All right. I’ll be there soon.”

“Are you still at Polly’s house?”

“Yes.”

Lucy hesitated. “Can I talk to her?”

“Ah…”

Nothing good could come of that, but Esme couldn’t think of an adequate block fast enough. She motioned Polly over and handed her the phone, knowing that she should probably attempt to eavesdrop or read at least read the expression on Polly’s face. However, when Polly turned around and spoke quietly, Esme gave up. She had no energy for the usual Shelby machinations.

Polly and Lucy only talked for a few minutes, and then Polly hung up.

“Come on,” she said to Esme briskly. “At this rate, I’d rather have Karl drive you to the shop than have you walk there on your own. You look like a breeze could tip you over.”

Esme submitted, shoving her feet into her boots and heading out the door. Polly picked up Esme’s forgotten coat and brought it out with her, bundling both the coat and Esme into the car and then beginning to drive. Esme leaned back and closed her eyes.

“What did Lucy want?” she murmured.

“She was apologizing to me for not telling me about Grace earlier. Apparently she thought that you had told me about it for her, and then worried it was a cowardly thing to do.”

Fuck. There was no sense in trying to cover it up. “Lucy’s too hard on herself,” Esme mumbled.

“No, she’s right. It would have been a cowardly thing for her to do if you had actually told me first. But you didn’t tell me, which begs the question: which of you is the coward?”

“What?”

“When were you going to tell me?”

Esme opened her eyes and blinked at Polly blearily. “I don’t know.”

Polly kept her eyes on the roda. “That woman could have taken down the entire business. She could have had Tommy killed. She almost did.” Without looking, Polly accentuated _almost_ by pointing a finger in Esme’s direction. “Seeing as I’m not willing to wager our lives on how much some snitch still wants to ride my nephew’s overactive cock, and seeing as I am the only one in this entire fucking city who seems willing and able to face him down, don’t you think it would be useful for me to know that she’s returned? And not just returned, returned at the same time as _Campbell?”_

Esme closed her eyes again. So they were back to being adversaries. Lovely. “I don’t know. You needed to sleep, and I didn’t want to upset you. I was going to figure it out, all right? I was going to handle it.”

“You were going to handle it. Handle it how?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s the third time you’ve said ‘I don’t know’ in as many minutes, Esme.”

“You know what, Polly? I wasn’t keeping track.”

Polly turned the car into the alley behind the Watery Lane shop and stopped the car so abruptly that Esme nearly hit her head on the windshield. Esme glared at Polly with the look of a woman who was ready for death, the way any woman would have to be ready for death if she wanted to glare at Polly.

Polly didn’t glare back. She returned Esme’s look with her customary steel, but without rancor.

“Do you know why I push you, Esme?” she said.

“Because you, like all the other Shelbys, are angry at the world. And I am conveniently within pushing distance.”

“No.” Polly spoke deliberately. “I push you because you lack the one thing a Shelby needs.”

Esme made a sound of exasperation shaped like a laugh, too tired to even sustain basic anger. “Can you make this lecture short? Because my head feels like it’s about to fall off my shoulders.”

“You lack ambition, Esme.”

“Lovely. Thank you for the ride. Have a good day.” Esme reached for the car door, but found her wrist in Polly’s grip.

Polly’s eyes were alight. “Listen to me when I’m trying to fucking help you. I am pushing you because unless you’re pushed, you don’t do shit. You ran down to the prison to help Ada. You killed a man to save Tommy. You risked seeing Campbell again when you came to warn me. You’ll do all that for others. But when was the last time you fought for something that you wanted only for yourself?”

Polly’s let go of Esme’s wrist, and both women sat back in their seats, turning a little to face each other.

“It’s how so many women are,” Polly went on. “Maybe it’s what we’re taught. You fight for your family, but you don’t fight for yourself. Greed’s not honorable, right? I know you care a lot about honor.”

“You say that like it’s a dirty word.”

“It’s been used to excuse the inexcusable time and time again. But that’s beside the point.”

“What is the point?”

_“Self-sacrifice is shit, Esme._ In this family, all we’ve ever had, we’ve had to fight for twice over. For the women in this family, anything we’ve had, we’ve had to fight for ten times over. Look at me: I spent my entire first marriage only living for my husband and my children, and do you know where that left me? I lost my children. I lost my sister. I almost lost Arthur and Tommy and Ada and John. And I found that my husband wasn’t worth the mud on my boots.”

Esme’s brain, slowed as it was by sleeplessness, slid to a complete stop. She had been trying to hustle together some kind of retort, some escape from yet another Polly lecture on how Esme was being a Shelby all wrong. But Polly’s first husband. That was a man that not even Tommy had ever put name to, much less discussed.

It occurred to Esme that when Polly said she was trying to help, she truly meant it.

Polly just watched her with those wise eyes, gave her time.

“So when did you figure it out?” Esme finally said. “Why did you leave him?”

Polly paused, clearly searching one last time for any hint of artifice or antagonism in Esme’s face, and finding none.

“I realized it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who deserves what. The difference between those who have everything and those who have nothing is mostly luck. Stop asking yourself _do I deserve this?_ because it’s a question no one else is asking. It will only slow you down.” Polly leaned in.

“ _Fuck_ deserve,” she said fiercely. “Take what you want.”

Esme’s throat went dry.

She could see, she could hear, she _knew_ that this was a lesson Polly had paid dearly to learn, a truth so valuable it couldn’t be bought, and this was not something she could disrespect. Lying was disrespect. Even in this family, everybody knew it.

And yet, what choice did Esme have?

“You’re right,” Esme said quietly. “But my troubles with Grace aren’t about that. When I say I want to handle her, it’s not because she’s taking something I want.”

“You don’t want him?”

Esme knew the right reply to that, but clarity didn’t make it any easier. “I don’t.”

“Then why handle her?” said Polly. “She’s in my territory, the business of the heart. Why not leave her to me?”

Fuck, trust Polly to find the hole in the story faster than a bullet leaving a barrel. Esme looked down, and scrambled for something solid. It took her a second, but she found something that sounded true.

“I don't appreciate any of my things being broken, from a dinner plate on up.”

When Esme looked up at Polly, to see how that truth went over, she knew before Polly even spoke that she had been found out. And then Polly spoke, and it sounded more cruelly naked in two simple words than Esme had ever allowed it to even be in her head.

“You’re afraid,” Polly said. “That’s what it is.”

Anger descended on Esme, so clear and so vicious that it felt good. This was the solid ground she was used to, a necessary defense. She recoiled.

“Stop pretending you’re my mother, Polly. Or pretending you’re God. All you care about is this fucking family, but you don’t even think I’m a part of the family, right? Calling me Esme Lee.”

“You’re tired, Esme, and it’s making you stupid. Fucking _think_ for a moment.”

“Oh, my mind is clear. I am thinking. You want me closer to my husband, but only because that benefits you. You’re managing your business of the heart, is that it? You’ll make Grace harmless by using me as a defense, it’s fucking tactical. Always so fucking smart. But I see you. I see exactly what you’re doing.”

“If I were using you like that, you wouldn’t know it,” Polly said.

“Jesus Christ, there’s it is again.” Esme lifted the corners of her lips in the emptiest wide smile. “You Shelbys all think you’re invincible.”

“No, I’m fucking serious,” Polly said. She seemed more amused than angry, but Esme couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or not.

“If I was truly using you,” Polly went on, “We’d never fight. You and I, we’d be friends, or at least friends the way you’re friends with people that are nice to you, the people you never really know. There would be no shouting. If I were using you, I’d wake up and say, oh, Esme, thank you so much for coming over, it means so much to me that you took care of my son. And as I drove you here, I’d mention Grace. Then I would lie. I’d say it’s completely understandable that you didn’t tell me about her. I would encourage you to go to him, not because it’s what you want, but because it’s what he wants.”

“That would be too obvious. Even you couldn’t pull that one off.”

“No, that’d be the piece of truth that makes the rest of it go down easier. If this is your way of making me say it, I’ll say it: of course he wants you, Esme. And it’s worse than that. He loves you.”

“Jesus Christ.” That was wrong in so many different ways that Esme couldn’t even figure out which objection she should make first.

“The more time you spend with us, the more religious you become, I see,” said Polly dryly.

“Oh, is that what’s happening.” Esme sighed and scrubbed her face with her hands. “All right, explain to me this: why would it be so fucking deceitful for you to be nice to me, just once, for a change?”

“Because I’d be telling you to go after him. I would tell you there’s nothing to be afraid of, that there’s no risk, that he’s yours, easily, and that it’s good. That would be the lie. If I were using you, Esme, I would send you after him thinking that you shouldn’t have a single cloud in your sky about the man. Not one doubt.”

_“Fuck.”_

“Yes.” Polly reached back into the backseat and retrieved her purse. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

“Wait,” said Esme, before Polly could open her car door.

“What?”

“Is that it?”

“What do you mean? It feels like we’ve been talking for five hours.”

Esme stared. “What is it that you want me to do?”

“Does it matter?”

Esme hesitated. _Fuck it._ “What do you think I should do?”

“Are you asking me for advice, Esme?”

“Yes. I’m hungover and I’ve had five hours of sleep in the past two days.”

“Oh, well, as long as you have an excuse.”

_“Polly.”_

Polly smiled, and as desperate as Esme was, as frustrated as she was, as ready to simply collapse into sleep as she truly was, Esme couldn’t help but find it reassuring. If Polly was nothing else, she was familiar, and she was strong. And they were on the same side.

“In this family,” Polly said, “The methods are complicated, but the goals are simple. Decide what you want. And then take it.”

“Shelby Company, unlimited.”

“Within the bounds of loyalty.”

“Of course.”

“But loyalty has never been an issue with you.”

“Careful, Polly. That was almost a compliment.”

“That was a compliment,” said Polly, as if that were a perfectly natural thing. “I’m going in now to do some work. You should go upstairs and get some sleep. Let me know which of us is handling Grace by the end of the day. And Esme?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

The car door closed with a quiet click behind Polly. Dumbfounded, Esme watched her as she walked across the alley to the back door of the Watery Lane house and went inside.

For several minutes, Esme simply sat in the car as a light rain began to tap out an irregular rhythm on the roof of the car.

Everything looked quite real. Aside from the throbbing in her head, everything felt quite normal. Esme pinched herself, hard.

Yes. Yes, she was awake. That had happened. All of it. Jesus fucking Christ. She was certain Polly was right about one thing, at least. She needed to get some sleep.

With an effort that felt Herculean, Esme hauled herself up and out the door, into the house, past the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the nearest room, where she crumpled in a heap onto the bed.

 

_Thunk._

When Esme woke up, she woke with absolutely no sense of time or place. She opened her eyes and Tommy was there, standing in front of a mirror, slipping something into his pocket and then buttoning up his waistcoat. He looked tense, but not in a way that screamed immediacy, so she knew she was safe. She nearly went back to sleep just knowing that, but then he caught her looking.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Changing. Go back to sleep, it’s fine.”

While Esme couldn’t tell if he was smiling, she knew that he seemed pleased with something. He had a plan, that’s what it was. She could always tell when he had a plan. Well, good. She found herself smiling too, but that was probably sleepiness.

She wanted to keep talking and that was probably sleepiness too. “I heard something.”

“I dropped my pocket watch.”

“Why are you changing?”

“I got soot on my shirt, and I have a meeting tonight. What are you doing in my bed?”

“It was the closest door.”

“I see.” He gave himself one last look in the mirror, as if to assure himself that he was impeccably dressed, then headed for the door. “You can go back to sleep, it’s fine. The shop’s covered.”

“What time is it?”

“Around two.”

“Come here.”

Tommy sat down on the bed next to her, his hip digging a little into her leg. He didn’t raise an eyebrow, or tilt his head, but she could tell simply from the way he looked at her that he was curious.

Esme spat on her sleeve and rubbed off a bit of soot that had remained behind his left ear. Then she sniffed her sleeve. It smelled a little like gunpowder.

“Explosion, was it?” she said.

“It took some testing to get the bomb right, but we finished it before noon and John delivered it. Arthur should be out of jail before the end of the day.”

Jesus Christ. “A jailbreak?”

“No, it was a Campbell issue.”

“Did it hurt him?”

“He’s whole. But I don’t think he’s very happy with me.” Tommy smiled.

Esme’s smile was only half vindictive satisfaction. “You and your fucking plans,” she said. She didn’t have the energy to press for further detail, so she fell back on more immediate practicalities. “If you wake me up in a couple hours, I can fry up some fish for dinner.”

“I won’t be home.”

“How late will you be out?”

“After some work, there’s still London business to take care of. I might not be home until morning.”

Certain details fell into place. For example, that was one of his most beautifully tailored suits. And when he said _London,_ he didn’t meet her eyes.

“Right,” Esme murmured. The only thing she was certain of was that she did not have the capacity to have this conversation with as little sleep as she had and as little information as he would give her. “Well, you know where I’ll be.”

“Yes.”

It was childish, but she laid back down and closed her eyes. She felt him pat her shoulder, heard him leave, and then she sank back down into sleep.

Sleep came easy, but the dreams were anything but. She rarely remembered anything from her dreams but the aftermath, the sensation she last felt when her eyes opened, maybe one or two faces, an object. This time it was panic, and a little red door closing and a broken jaw and his breathing in a broken rhythm she remembered, stuttering like it was coming to a conclusion, too shallow, too fast.

When Esme woke, her face was still wet. She swiped her sleeve across her face and sat up. Tea, she decided. Yes.

She was halfway into the hall when she realized she was stepping in a smudge of dirt. In her household, on the second floor? Unacceptable.

Wait, wait. She had been the one tracking the dirt in. Boots on, in her exhaustion, launching herself into bed…

She walked back into Tommy’s room. There, at the foot of the bed, were her brown boots, laces tucked neatly in them. She didn’t remember taking them off. That must have been him.

God damn it.

Ten minutes later, Esme went down the stairs, dressed, boots on.  In the shop, there were no customers, it being still mid-evening. John hunched over a ledger, scowling and muttering the figures to himself as he did calculations in the margins. Lucy shot her a smile and got back to typing. Only Polly lifted her head to talk to Esme.

“What are you doing?” Polly said.

Esme didn’t break stride. “Handling it.”

 

 

Esme knocked on the door. Then she wished she’d taken a moment to do her hair up. Well, what would the use of that be? She’d slept on the train, but she knew full well she still had dark circles under her eyes.

“One moment please!” a man’s voice called. Esme pressed her ear to the door, in time to hear him saying, “Grace, do you have any change? All I have is dollars.”

The elevator chimed, and Esme quickly stepped away from the door as a giggling young couple emerged into the hall. They swept past her in a whirl of perfume and alcohol, and then stopped two doors down. While the young man fumbled in his pockets for the room key, the young woman fixed her clear gray eyes on Esme, taking in every inch of her. Esme, knowing that she didn’t look of a piece with the golden hotel round her, lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes. For no evident reason, the woman’s scarlet lips lifted in a smile of approval. 

Then the door in front of Esme opened.

“Hi, I’m so sorry—oh.” 

Whatever Esme had expected Grace’s husband to be, this wasn’t him. Tall and square-jawed, sure; young, that was surprising; brown hair wavy and a little fussy, a little more surprising; dressed in a robe, that wasn’t exactly par for the course. But what surprised Esme most of all about the man was the true happiness that lit up his dark eyes. When had she last seen that kind of simple, unburdened joy? The last time Lizzie and John had gotten really drunk together?

“You’re not room service,” he said, but he said it like it was something funny and delightful. Despite everything, Esme found herself smiling in return.

“If you’re still offering a tip, I’ll take the money,” she said.

“Is that you, Esme Lee?” 

Esme couldn’t see her, but she recognized the voice as Grace’s, as clear and imperious as ever. She made a sound of astonishment, for the husband’s benefit. “Can’t believe she still remembers my voice.”

“Oh, Grace remembers everything,” he said proudly. 

The bathroom door opened and Grace emerged from it. She seemed to glide, gilded twice over by the lamplight on her shining hair and the delicate detailing on her dress. 

“How could I forget you?” Grace said with a smile. 

 

As Esme conjured up a smile in reply, Grace swept across the room and enveloped her in a hug. Esme could make out notes of rose and white musk in Grace’s perfume, subtly sweet. “Let’s talk,” Esme murmured into the golden curtain of curls that just barely touched Grace’s shoulder. Then Grace withdrew.

“Clive, this is Esme, an old friend. Esme, this is my husband.”

“Mr. Macmillan, of course.”

“It’s always a pleasure to meet any friend of my wife.” He beamed and shook her hand like a man with nothing to prove. 

“It’s been such a long time, I would love to talk with you, but I see you have somewhere to be,” Esme said, turning to Grace.

“A few minutes won’t hurt.”

“I can go down to the lounge,” Clive offered.

“That would be lovely, thank you.”

“Won’t be but a minute,” Esme added, as Clive went out the door with one last smile. Then she turned back to Grace. 

As soon as the door shut, Grace turned and glided back into the bathroom, so Esme followed her there. She moved some of the bottles and brushes aside and perched on the countertop as Grace resumed applying her makeup. “Where did you find him?”

“New York. And he found me.”

“That sounds romantic.”

Grace ignored that, and focused on choosing a shade of lipstick. She did this last of all her makeup, and it was quite strange to see her lips pale against her rouged and powdered cheeks, her shadowed eyelids. All or nothing, that was the way Esme thought of makeup. This rather confirmed it. 

Esme leaned over and looked at the last two lipsticks that Grace was considering. One was a few shades closer to scarlet than the other.

“Isn’t it funny?” Esme said. “They’re both made of the same thing. They both cover up the real color underneath. But that one looks artificial, and that one doesn’t.”

“Polly couldn’t bother to take the train herself?” Grace said, choosing the darker shade.

“She didn’t send me. Though I’d like to think I come with her blessing.”

Grace took her sweet time in applying the lipstick, and Esme had to admire her skill; it looked perfectly natural, perfectly even, perfectly shaped.

“Why did you come, then?” Grace said calmly, putting the lipstick away.

Esme waited until she was finished, waited until she was looking Grace directly in the eye. It came as a surprise to her that Grace’s eyes were a shade of green; for some reason, she had assumed they were blue. How strange that a woman could be so important to Esme, and yet she could have barely enough memories to cobble together the basic facts of her appearance. 

At any rate, she held Grace’s gaze, and repeated the one thing she was sure of: “I don’t like it when people break my things, from a dinner plate on up.”

"Break is such an extreme word,” Grace murmured. “You must have me mistaken for someone else. Perhaps Greta?"

That was supposed to sting, because Esme wasn't supposed to recognize the name. But she did. She tried to keep her voice light as she went on, keeping Polly’s example in mind, but it was difficult. "If Greta did came back, I’d give her my blessing; the worst she ever did was die, and that was hardly her fault. But you, everything you did was calculated. Look at you. You fucked all of us over so you could complete your mission, and then you got your happy ending with your rich husband and your gorgeous dress—"

"Thank you."

"—and you're still looking to take from us." Esme pushed off the counter and stood on her own two feet. 

"It was bad enough the first time," she said. "If you take him now, you'd better fucking keep him."

Grace paused, smiling a half-incredulous smile, lips slightly parted. For a moment, Esme had absolutely no idea what she was going to say.

When Grace spoke, she spoke so deliberately that Esme couldn’t help but notice how beautiful her voice really was. "I apologize,” Grace said slowly, “If unsubstantiated rumors managed to sour your marriage."

There was only a hint of condescension, but the condescension was there, and that was it.

Thus far, Grace had done nothing that Esme could not understand, and perhaps Esme had even admired her, but to stand here in this glittering hotel in her homemade long dark dress with her many pockets, her braided hair, to stand before this perfumed golden creature and be judged, all brought Esme back to some very familiar places. Grace thought she was simply The Wife, as in a category of minor problem to be solved, just some girl from a forced gypsy marriage who was worried about her reputation. Esme could tell by the way Grace said _ unsubstantiated rumors managed to sour your marriage _ , like Esme was someone on the outside. Not even a minor problem. A puddle to step over, and nothing more.

 

No.

 

"What do you know about marriage?” Esme said, and she said it from so deep in her chest that Grace physically stood in response. “This isn't about rumors. This isn’t even about my feelings. This is about the work. You’ve fought with him, and you’ve fucked him, but what do you know about the weeks in between? 

“What do you know about trying to get through the birthing season without losing a single foal when half the mares have the strangles? When two foals die in the same night and Curly starts to cry, what do you do? All the men there have known him for most of their lives, but you’re the only woman in the room, and they look at you like you know what to say. What do you say? When Tommy goes out alone afterwards to dig the graves, do you let him go or do you pick up a shovel?

“What is it like going to church for your nieces’ baptism, knowing that every person looking at you is thinking: I hope those Shelbys go straight to hell? Having to shake their hands and smile and wish them a good morning. What do you know about the Deacon’s wife refusing to talk to you, because it was her niece that was killed by a ricochet in the firefight John had with some of Kimber’s old men in Digby Park? Tell me what it’s like to have no friends outside the family, knowing that even some of the family doesn’t really think you’re family at all.

“How many times did you fuck him? Lizzie’s fucked him more than that. But I’m not worried about her, because I know the marriage bed is more about nightmares than it is about sex. You know he has nightmares, but have you slept in the same house with him for long enough to know what it means when his hands shake?”

Esme took a deep breath, then stepped closer, so close that all she could see was Grace, and all Grace could see was her. This time, when she spoke, her voice went as low as it could go. It needed no shout. “Tell me, Grace, what is it like to sit beside him while he’s dying? When you’re already nauseous from the way the boat pitches back and forth, and his fever is so high he’s almost delirious, what do you say? Do you think he can hear you? Now’s your chance to say anything you want with no reply, because Italians have reached into his mouth and cut him there too, so he tries not to talk. When they’ve broken nearly every bone in his body and he tells you he needs the same ointment that the horses use, how long do you spend arguing with him before he loses consciousness? Do you try to be gentle? Trick question, that decision isn’t up to you. Curly tells you the ointment only works if you knead it in deep, so even if it hurts him, you have to do it.  

“Answer me this: What does he sound like when you’re hurting him? Do you know?” 

She waited long enough that Grace could have given an answer. But Grace said nothing.

“Then don’t talk about marriage to me.”

Blinking, Esme stepped away. She felt new, and strange, thrumming with some power she hadn’t realized that she possessed before. Grace was there, but that hardly mattered. She understood matters now. She understood herself.

“Is that all?” Grace said. She said it like she couldn’t decide whether to be mocking or indifferent, and yes, Esme knew she had said a lot, but she had needed to say all of it. Not for Grace, but for herself.

She had nothing much left to say now. “You are not welcome in Birmingham,” she offered, as if that wasn’t patently obvious, and then she turned and headed through the bathroom door. 

“I don’t need to come to Birmingham. Birmingham will come to me,” Grace said, and when Esme didn’t stop walking, she added: “If this is so important to you, why couldn’t you stop him?”

“I chose not to. Enjoy the tactical error; it won’t happen again. Goodnight, Grace.”

“I will have a good night, thank you, Esme.”

Esme closed the door quietly behind her. She walked down the center of the hall and took the elevator this time, instead of the stairs.

In the lobby, she saw Clive, contentedly perusing a magazine. She went over to him.

“Mr. Macmillan? You had better go up and say goodbye to your wife before she goes,” Esme said.

Clive smiled up at her and folded the newspaper. “Thank you, I will. It was lovely to meet you, Mrs. Lee.”

Esme smiled back. “Oh, Lee’s my maiden name. I’m Mrs. Shelby now.”

Outside, the night air was cool and a little damp. She had just missed the rain by a few minutes. She stood on the wet pavement and breathed the city in deeply. 

London was too big and bright a city for her to see the stars above, but she knew where they all were anyway.

She began walking to the train station. She was ready to go home.

 

 

 

 

 

**NOW**

“Hello?”

“I’m coming back,” Tommy said into the hotel telephone.

“Good,” said Polly, and even through the line he could hear that she didn’t really care. That was what he had expected. He hoped it could continue. 

“I found her.”

“Where?” Fuck. He needed Polly to go back to dull resentment, but he knew she wouldn’t. He had to get it all out very quickly or else—

“There was—” He cleared his throat. “Ah, a police report. Her father was in it as well. They were dumped. Throats cut. They bled out—”

“Tommy.” 

No, now she was gentle.  _ No _ . He pressed his forehead into the wall. He knew that nobody could see him, but he still tried to stop his face from crumpling, and failed. 

“How do you know—”

“He had a cane. She had—I’ll give you a copy of the report.” He could hear the rasping in his own voice.

“No, I believe you.” 

He clung to the handle of the telephone and wished that she didn’t. She was the only person left with no reason to lie to him about this, the only person he trusted in his own limited way, and for once, he wished that she would tell him he was wrong. 

But instead, she said, almost timidly, “Tommy, there was no way you could have—”

He hung up. 

He could hear himself breathing. He could hear the clock ticking. When he swept it off the side table, it crashed into the wall, fell to the floor, and kept ticking. Some things were not so fragile. It was a useless anger. It was all he had.

He wiped his eyes quickly and picked up the phone again. “Shelby Company Limited.”

“One moment, please.”

“Hello, Shelby Com—”

“Lizzie.”

“Tommy?”

“Tell Polly I’ll be back by morning.” 

He hung up again.

Ticking and breathing, ticking and breathing. He stalked over to the spot on the bedroom floor where he’d dropped his hat and coat, stooped to pick them up, and put them on again. First the coat around his shoulders, then the brim pulled low over his eyes. That helped, a little. Not enough.

He found himself reaching into the inner pocket of his coat almost without thinking and only realized what he was doing when his fingers touched worn paper. Did he look at them often enough to make it a habit? It was a habit he would have to break.

Today, though, a little mercy, just enough to survive.

He took out the telegrams and thumbed through them. The January 1, 1922 telegram had somehow gotten a corner torn. He didn’t like that. Well. Why did it matter? He would have to make himself burn them all soon; that was the fastest way of shedding the old habit. 

If he could breathe like a clock, that would be good. He could hear himself breathing and it was like watching a horse limp with a broken leg. Someone should put him down if he couldn’t even breathe properly.

He had expected six telegrams, but found a seventh item too smooth for that, and too thick. Telegrams didn’t materialize out of nowhere, but his chest seized when his finger found it. That was incidental. It was nothing but the letter that the old woman had given him to deliver to the Italian Quarter on his last wasted visit to London, when he, all but submerged in sheer humiliation, had found her dire ramblings on the subject of Italians to be almost soothing.

Italians. Yes. He put the papers and the envelope away. It was if someone had thrown him a rope. (With which he could pull himself out of this, or with which he could hang himself? Maybe both.) Something Alfie had said to him floated back:  _ better have that looked after, Tommy.  _ As ardently as he so often wished to crush Alfie and his enterprises with all the force of a jackhammer, he had found the man to be right more often than not. And in this case, Alfie was entirely right. Italians. Why not? They were already on hardly the friendliest of terms. A public skirmish might complicate London matters and give Tommy some strategic cover.

And he was more than hungry for it. (She was—

His fingernails pressed half-moons into the flesh of his palms. Someone else should bleed for a change.

He walked the entire distance himself, through all the different neighborhoods, over crowded industrial bridges, and more than once, down cramped and stinking alleys, but nobody talked to him, nobody was foolish enough to look directly at him, it was all just a press of bodies in the general mob that was the wave of London public in the high tide of afternoon. If someone had looked he wouldn’t have minded. He wanted the fight to come quicker, but he was satisfied knowing that he had a destination at least, he was satisfied and then he was standing, waiting to cross the road, and he caught out of the corner of his eye the glimpse of a black horse and he closed his eyes and by the time he opened them again, his chance to cross the road had gone. 

He walked anyway, and the cars and drivers screeched their protests, but all he got for it was a bit of mud splashed against his shoes and the hem of his coat. 

He gloried in the change in atmosphere he found as soon as he approached the very fringes of the Italian Quarter: all those eyes on him, suddenly, some furtive, some challenging. These people did not want him there and he soaked it in, the incredibly clear way that it all made his mind and world narrow down. There was a woman with a long dark braid that for a moment made his mind stutter, but he kept walking and his heart beat faster and he could almost taste it. Soon he would taste it. When someone was trying to kill him, it tasted distinctly bitter and sharp, almost acid.

The restaurant that this diddikoi granddaughter worked at was not too far into the Italian Quarter, so by the time he went inside, there were only two men following him. One of them, a tall man, he half-remembered from a meeting with Darby Sabini; the other, a youth, had likely guessed Tommy’s identity from his hat and his eyes. Whether it was civic duty or explicit orders, Tommy didn’t care. 

He walked into the center of the restaurant, feeling the dinner conversations around him drop to a hush, and held up the letter. 

“I have something here for the granddaughter of Delilah Waters,” he said. His back was to the two men, but sitting on the table in front of him and slightly to his left, there was a wineglass quite reflective enough to act as a mirror. The two men had spread out, wisely, and were walking slowly towards him. As if he’d try to escape. 

“I think you’re in the wrong neighborhood,” said the tall one.

“I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

“I don’t know what you gypsies use, but here, we use the fucking postal service. It’s called civilization. Maybe you’ve heard of it?” In the reflection, he could see the tall man reaching into his pocket.

Tommy closed his eyes for just one second. There it was: the bitter taste, his heart pounding faster, the readiness, the soldier’s minute. He wanted the razor, but he could duck and reach for his shoulder holster and take out the tall one with his gun first; he had his coat unbuttoned for this exact reason. He took in one last long breath, thinking with an almost physical longing of the sound the table would make when he tipped it over to provide him cover, the shattered dishes, the blood, at last—

“Tommy?”

He opened his eyes and dropped the letter.

There was a woman standing in the doorway to the kitchen with a sponge in one hand, hair swept up into a scarf, dark eyes searching his.

In the wineglass reflection, he could see the tall man began to advance on him, and the youth following, their shoulders set, their bodies purposeful. He could see it all coming for him. He couldn’t move.

The woman was Esme.


	4. petrichor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THEN • On the cusp of achieving one of his greatest dreams, struggling with equal measures of hope and fear, Tommy is confronted with an unexpected ultimatum.
> 
> NOW • Guarding her heart and planning her escape, Esme is horrified to find that the enemy she’s fighting is not who she thought he was at all.

 

 

  

 

 

** PART II. LOVE LIKE A STEEL-JAW BEAR TRAP **

**THEN • 1921 • TOMMY**  

** NOW • 1923 • ESME **

 

 

 

 

 

**NOW**

Tommy stood there like stone, eyes searchlights. Esme’s mind seized. Even frozen in shock, his deeply familiar beauty could still do her violence; she felt as though something had ruptured inside her ribcage, as though she had begun bleeding.

She forced herself to look past him, but that wasn’t much better. Even with his heavy coat on and his cap pulled low, she could read the tension rippling through all the lines of his body.

Pulse quickening, pockets empty, she tried to focus. The tall enemy was a known danger to her, a Sabini associate, but the young one was unknown. Not that it mattered. They could have been anyone and she would still know which side she was on.

Tommy said her name, once, quietly, and she set her teeth so hard against it she could feel the tension in her jaw. Dropping the sponge, she put her hands up, palms out, and began to walk towards Tommy, trying to catch the eyes of the man on the right, the tall one, who she instinctively knew by age, bearing, and a thousand other indications to be the senior of their two attackers.

 _“Please wait,”_ she said, painfully aware that Italian still sounded broken and clumsy coming from her mouth, unable to do much else. _“Please.”_

Both men kept walking slowly, but now the young one aimed at her. She flinched. At that, Tommy looked away from her, into the reflection of the two men in a glass. Esme was only a few feet away from him now, and she could see the moment when he realized that she was a target. It transformed him. He reached under his jacket—

 _“No.”_ Esme said it to him with such low urgency that even the young man aiming at her stopped in his tracks for a second.

Tommy looked to her, questioning, but she was looking over his shoulder now, at the tall one, the leader, trying to come up with the right words. The only one she could think of was _peace,_ and she repeated it as she reached into Tommy’s coat with her left hand and retrieved his gun from its holster. If they’d truly wanted Tommy dead, he’d be dead by now, or at least bleeding.

Esme held her breath and put the gun down carefully on a nearby table, next to someone’s dish of baked chicken. Tugging at the lapel of Tommy’s coat, she began walking backwards, and he followed her, hands up, eyes darting back and forth, aware now. The shock was wearing off, and she’d not be able to manage him much longer. She began walking faster.

 _“I leave. He leaves,”_ she said, again in Italian. She had forgotten the entire future tense, along with the word for _we_.

The tall Italian stopped following, and soon enough, the youth copied him.

The tall man said something in Italian she didn’t quite catch; that; she understood _tell him_ and maybe _time,_ and certainly _gypsy_ with a crueller tone, but it didn’t matter. As long as the two Italians stood and did not follow, as long as she had Tommy’s coat clutched warm wool in her hand, it would be all right.

She turned when they passed into the kitchen. She thought everyone would have fled, but there was still Martina, Elias, and Tommaso, standing and staring at her as if they had never seen her before.

 _“Martina, car keys, please,”_ Esme said, extending her free hand, open and empty.

Martina shrank away.

_“Please, Martina, quickly. He’s family. Please.”_

There was a small, metallic _click_ and all three recoiled. Esme turned to see that Tommy had taken the long-handled razor out of his pocket and flipped it open into a gleaming threat.

Tommaso began shouting, Elias reached behind him to get something on the countertop, and Martina flung the car keys with such poor aim they landed in the sink. Shoving Tommy towards the back door, Esme darted forwards, fished out the keys from the soapy water, and fled. There was no time to try to fix anything. She had constructed this life to shatter more easily than the previous ones, but the shards cut just as deep.

Outside the sun was unbearably bright. Esme got to the right car in six strides, scrambled up into the driver’s seat, and slotted the right key in immediately. Tommy swung into the shotgun seat.

“Where—”  

“Just drive.”

And they were off. As she sped south towards the nearest border of the neighborhood, Esme kept trying to put together sentences in Italian, in case they were stopped, but none of them made perfect sense. _This man is my family and he went to here to talk to me because we have a family trouble_ was the closest thing to a full sentence that she got to putting together, and the grammar was all wrong but at least she’d tried to put truth in it.

Her hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel and they were both nearly panting from the escape, so she could hear herself breathing and she could hear him breathing. She could hear Tommy breathing. She could hear Tommy breathing, and she didn’t care about anything but survival. His, hers, the two were indistinguishable, even after all that time.

  
  
  


**THEN**

This time, Tommy had a plan. He approached it like a battle, contingencies upon contingencies, with confidence enough that the first iteration of the plan would run just as he ordered it. He had a plan, and he clung to that through such waves of expectation that sometimes he felt as though waves of electricity were running through him. A plan. Everything was in place except for the woman herself. If she appeared, that would be the single greatest assurance he had that it would run.

And appear Grace did. She came to him first as the sound of a knock.

His body moved down the hall. He put one foot in front of the other, he remembered to breathe, he reached and turned the handle and there she was, a fist to the gut and even that was expected, even that much he had accounted for, the way he couldn’t breathe. No amount of rouge or gilt could change her. No amount of perfume or silk could disguise the woman underneath, the woman who always shot first. He looked in her eyes and knew her.

She wore all that beauty like armor, but he saw it as an invitation, too. It must have taken care and attention to achieve that kind of delicate perfection. She knew him, and still she hadn’t only come, but she’d also made an effort.

After that thought, it was easy. Grace spoke like a lady, spoke well, said things like _I wasn’t really sure about coming tonight,_ but those were protestations to nobody but herself, the things she had to say to appease the gold on her finger. That was all right. The flimsiness of it all didn’t unsettle him. He had a plan. He was ready.

“I lit a fire in the bedroom upstairs. My plan was that we sit here for a while and talk about old times, drink some whiskey. I was going to tell you I hadn't spent a day without thinking about you, and then we were going to go upstairs and sleep together. But just now, on the way to opening the door, I changed my mind.”

He had pushed her far beyond what another woman would take. He kept going, as coldly as if he was merely telling a cabbie the address he wanted.

“So just have one drink,” he said, brutal. “Tell me how happy you are in New York, and then you can go.”

He could nearly taste the change in the atmosphere. Grace bridled, finally, lovelier in anger than she’d even been before, eyes alight. She had been many things, never meek, and he enjoyed this further proof that she had not changed in her time away.

“You changed your mind?” she said.

“Mm.” And after as much as Tommy had suffered, didn’t he deserve, just a little, to let the devil out?

Even insulted, Grace remained. She didn’t take it any longer, of course, but she shot back at him with bullets she knew couldn’t so much as touch him.

“As a matter of fact, I am happy in New York…” And so on and so on.

Her husband was sweet and kind, was he? What were those things to Tommy? When had he ever been sweet and kind? What did it matter? These were measures from some other world, irrelevant, irrelevant to his body and to hers and to sleeping soundly with only a slim hand on his chest to keep away an entire army, the swift, brief peace he sought. She would stay with him, this time.

“Well then, go,” Tommy said.

“Jesus.”

“You’re still here.” He knew how the rest of the night would go.

Though he found a dark satisfaction in this part of it, he didn’t mean to hurt her any more than she’d meant to hurt him; that is, he didn’t mean to hurt her at all. He gentled as much as he could without apologizing. She settled, still a little wary, but it was all right.

Grace was safe this way, moving along the strands of the web he’d woven, and he loved to see her do it, loved the way he knew what she would say before she said it: _Yes, I like Charlie Chaplin._ The slight softening in her eyes when he said, _I want to impress you._ The way he could predict the quality of the small talk between them on the car ride between house and party: _I’ve always been good at travelling_. The way he could put his hand on the small of her back as they lingered in the background of the gathered guests, and he knew she would not move away.

“Oh my God, that's him,” she said.

That was rare, the catch of surprise in her voice, and he luxuriated in it, didn’t speak, just hummed his assent. It had been more than a year and he still remembered that that catch of surprise in a different context.

“That's really Charlie Chaplin in person.”

“Yeah. He's in England, promoting his film.” Hope, he thought, that was the word, and it wasn’t just the champagne. Couldn’t be; he’d dove into whole bottles of stronger stuff before and it had never come close to this.

“And how the hell do you know Charlie Chaplin?”

“I don't. I know his bodyguard, Wag MacDonald. It's that chap there.” And Tommy had more to say, but now he realized that Wag was looking back at him directly, unsmiling, unflinching. Tommy stiffened and forgot the cadence of his speech.

“He looks as if you just cursed his mother,” Grace said. But she wasn’t afraid at all, merely curious.

Tommy refused to be afraid too, but felt some discomfort seep in from a place he’d rather not name. It had nothing to do with any physical threat.

“It’s part of the job,” he said, “looking like he could cut a man’s hand off any second.”

“Has he done that?”

“Just an ear, just the once, when he was a bookie in Birmingham. Before he moved to L.A.”

Wag looked away, and Tommy was regaining the rhythm. The night was still his. He had a _fucking_ plan this time.

“You see,” he said, “Wag is also a Romani Gypsy, as is Chaplin. But he keeps it a secret. Chaplin was born on the Black Patch, a Gypsy camp in Birmingham. That's why he gave Wag the job, even though Wag was on the run.”

And now for the truth. However carelessly he tried to say it, it was still the line of the night, the one thing they both could accept, the kernel at the heart of them, the thing nobody else seemed able to understand.

“See,” he said, “We've all got secrets, Grace.”

Yes, she would understand, he knew. He had never seen a need to worry about her comprehension and he wasn’t going to start now.

In the meantime, he glanced back at Wag, found him staring again, and met the man’s faint scorn with his own steel. He steered Grace forward. His night would go on, old Black Patch loyalties be damned.

  
  
  


Half an hour later, he slipped away for a moment on the lightest excuse to indulge in the one assured moment he had, and found it nearly as perfect as he had imagined it. He rushed it a little, like was rushing the whole night.

“Hello?”

“You said you knew my brother’s address in Belsize Park, so I expect you have men watching the house to see who comes and goes. Well, tonight, your men will see me return to the house with a very beautiful woman. She will stay until just before midnight. Of course, I'll close the curtains. Can you guess who the woman is?”

 _“Liar!”_ Campbell shouted so furiously that Tommy could nearly hear the spray of spittle.

“Sleep well, Mr. Campbell.” Then he hung up.

There was nobody left but him to hear his own defiance, but he said it anyway: “I will.”

  
  
  


Returning to the party, Tommy took Grace in at a glance. Over the course of the night, a certainty had crept into her, a certainty that matched his, and he could see it in the relaxed slope of her shoulders, the easy quickness of her smile. She was deep in conversation with one of the West End’s rising stars, talking with him as just graciously as she had talked to Danny Whiz-Bang back in the day.

Affection surged through him, only to be cut short by the realization that Wag MacDonald was approaching her. Beset by some simpering actress, by the time he got to Grace, Charlie had already gone, and Wag with him. She seemed unbothered, for which Tommy was thankful.

“I think we should go,” he murmured, one hand on the back of her chair.

Her eyes questioned him.

“It’s getting late,” he said, voice dropped down a couple notes.

Grace reached for her purse, which didn’t surprise him, and reached for his hand on the way out, which did.

Outside, the night was dry and a little warm, the moon full overhead.

“Did you like our Wag, then?” he said, lighting up a cigarette to give his eyes and hands something to dwell on other than her.

“He seemed friendly, if a little awkward. He said something about having to pay his respects to Mrs. Shelby before he and Charlie went.”

Jesus. Tommy exhaled slowly. “And you said...”

“I said it was lovely to meet him.”

Right. “What about Charlie?”

“Are you asking if you impressed me?” There was a smile in her voice now, and he looked up.

“Yes,” he said frankly.

“Well, you did.” Grace smiled with lips and eyes as well as voice now, and held out her hand once more. “Take me home, Tommy.”

The flare of hope in Tommy’s chest bloomed beyond all reason. He threw the cigarette down on the pavement, stomped it out with one well-shined shoe.

“As you wish,” he said.

  
  
  


**NOW**

Esme didn’t know how long she drove. After she and Tommy had escaped Little Italy, she headed south, doubled back along roads, and clung to rich neighborhoods, ready to duck the police or pursuers at any moment, till finally he said, “We’re safe now.”

Esme pulled over and squinted at the road sign. It was a decent enough place to leave the car.  

“Let’s walk,” she said.

He acquiesced, and she was glad of it; she needed the time, the quiet, to think, to move past her heart thudding rabbitquick in her chest. She walked slowly along the sidewalk, and he matched her pace. It took some time to get past the insistent thought that perhaps he was wrong, perhaps the a hail of gunfire might break out like an unexpected shower of rain at any minute, but the wind and the smell of the river helped wake her up. They brought her out of fear and out of him and into the stern practicalities of the present.

She would send Martina the car key and the location of the car, and some money, if she could find a way to get any. An apology letter too, of course, though no words would be enough. It made her sick to think of how she’d had to leave. Martina especially had looked at her with such surprise, as though she had really trusted Esme, as though she did not think it possible that Esme could hurt her.

For that was what Esme had done, wasn’t it? When Sabini’s people came knocking, they would ask why Esme had been given work and shelter, and Martina would have only the half-truths Esme had told her, and that would not be enough. The laws of the land in Little Italy were no more lenient than those of Small Heath; no aid or comfort to the enemy. Esme had managed to repay sweet with bitter against her own will, again. Thanks to him. She held onto that thought as a navigator would the North Star, and then glanced over at him.

It was quick but brutal. He kept his eyes on the sidewalk ahead. He had not changed; the close-shaven hair, the shape of his profile, even the cut of his suit was the same. The material might be finer quality, but she had a feeling that he still got his clothes tailored at Chin’s, and she didn’t want to know that. She didn’t want to know him.

He had not changed even in his expressions; he had on the stonefaced look he wore when he knew some outsider must not see him weak. She was the outsider, then; that came as no surprise. Let her be a danger to him. It should run both ways.

For after all he was a danger, wasn’t he? She should face the threat head-on, since lying to herself was a bad habit she’d been trying to break, a luxury she couldn’t afford. The threat was recognizing that coat, remembering wearing it on a dozen nights all blended into one: foaling season, trip to the Black Patch, forgetting her own coat back at the Garrison, a hand steadying her on the cobblestones, the herbal smell of the witch hazel balm she used to make for his aftershave. The threat was not only him, but the circumstances which primed her for weakness: six months of starvation and a door just opened to a nine-course feast. A bed so empty. And even if she’d had another husband by now, by some miracle, even then—

She admitted it: the pull of his gravity wouldn’t fucking quit. Give it a year, two, three, a decade, and put them like this, side by side, breathing the same air, and she’d always feel something coil in her chest like a snake about to strike. _Jesus._

All the tension in her body and she didn’t even have a purse strap to clench a fist around. Blame him for that too. Blame him for everything; that made it easier. Especially because, in the end, he was more likely guilty than not.

Tommy cleared his throat, and Esme didn’t yield, didn’t look over. They were on a bridge across the Thames now, sunset turning the horizon crimson, the sky above indigo.

“There’s a hotel not far from here. I have—” he began, and his voice was pitched so low, so nearly soft, she had to stop him talking.

“I’m not interested in your real estate, Tommy.”

Even to her own ears, that cut quick and sharp and maybe she didn’t need to feed the anger after all. She had thought it reduced to a few embers, but maybe it burned properly still. She impressed herself. Perhaps she was ready.

Tommy blinked, then slid back into that particular voice of his, the one that dripped condescension. “I don’t own the hotel, Esme,” he said slowly. “I have a room in it.”

Esme stopped dead in her tracks and turned to him.

“What did you do?” she said. She tilted her chin up a fraction, which helped.

“What did _I_ do?” A sliver of something shone through his eyes. Irritation, likely.

“I told Delilah to only let you contact me if she truly thought it would be a war otherwise,” Esme said. “And I told her to _fucking_ telephone. I knew you’d bring trouble with you.”

“A war?”

“You must have killed someone. One of ours.” It was the only thing that made sense, but she didn’t want it to be true. As he took out a box of cigarettes, buying himself some time, she realized with a sinking feeling that it probably was.

“Delilah didn’t tell me it was you,” was all he said. “I didn’t know you were there at all. She told me that she wanted a letter delivered to her granddaughter in Little Italy, and that I was the only one who could go there safely.”

Esme studied him a moment, trying to find the lie, and then gave up. It’d been so long, who knew if she still had the ability.

“Safely? You’ve disproved that,” she said.

“I got out in one piece.”

“That was my doing, not yours.”

Esme reached over and took the box of cigarettes from him, selected one of them for herself. If Tommy was surprised, he didn’t show it. He merely leaned in and lit it for her, watched her inhale, and fuck. It tasted like him. Cheap tar and 2 AM and she should have known better, but now she was going to taste him for an hour at least.

“So she set us up,” Esme said. “I should have known. Why does every auntie think she knows better than everyone else, as if old age could make someone a god? Delilah can’t be a god, she’s too fucking short for it. Tell her that, next time you see her.”

“Tell her yourself.”

Esme ignored that. “You know what else? That’s not the only nonsense about this. What’s the great Tommy Shelby doing, taking time off from ruling the world? Are you really delivering mail for little old ladies now?”

He scratched his nose with his thumb, not quite looking at her. “Something like that.”

“So you ran an errand for her, knowing that your cap would set off alarms the whole length of Little Italy? I think not. You had to know a fight would come.”

Tommy shrugged. “If a fight comes, it comes. I don’t care.”

He exhaled smoke slowly, all sweet recklessness, and Esme wished he would look at her, so she could roll her eyes at him and break the spell. Save that pose for some other woman. She wouldn’t be taken in by a line like that, no matter how well he said it.

“Of course you care,” she said. “You always take the possibility of a fight into account. It’s in the back of your mind every minute of every day.”

 _It’s what had you still flinching at loud noises when you’re deepest drunk,_ she wanted to add, but didn’t. She wasn’t wearing a ring anymore. Still: “You must have wanted a fight to come.”

Esme waited in silence for a long time, and as she did, she counted out her breaths, which was a reliable way to tell time when it seemed to slow: one, two, three. When he finally had to look at her, she looked directly back at him. She stripped the protective veneer of anger off her voice and let the meaning of her words sit plain.

“The middle of Sabini’s territory, with no plan, just a gun. You didn’t even bring Arthur with you,” she murmured. “What were you doing, Tommy?”

A muscle pulsed in his jaw.

“What was I doing? What about you?” he said, voice wound so tight it sounded like it might crack. “You could have sent a telegraph, not even an expensive one. One word. _Dead_ . At least then I would know it was fucking _intentional._ ”

Esme looked away.

“What did you want me to think—” His voice cracked.  “—of all that fucking silence?”

She curled her fingers into not-quite-fists, fingernails digging into her palms. What was there to say?

He paused a moment, and when he spoke again, it was only quiet. “What were you trying to do, Esme? Hide?”

“Yes,” she managed to say.

“From who?”

And here it came. “Among others, you.”

Then it was Tommy’s turn to look away. There were ways Esme could soften the silence, she knew, but they were all cobblestones lining the start to a street she refused to walk. Hurt him a little now and it saved them all so much pain later, right? Only she was so tired. She was so tired and it was awful to do this when he was clearly already hurting over something, already looked like he’d reached the part in one of his plans when the walls were closing in and he didn’t know if he’d make it out.

“I wasn’t trying to punish you,” she finally said. “I simply didn’t want you involved in business that was nobody’s but my own. I wanted to sort it out myself. I didn’t want your interference.”

Tommy took one long drag on his cigarette.

“You’ve made that very clear,” he said.

Esme said nothing. She was fully occupied with the task of not crying.

After a moment, Tommy threw his cigarette onto the street and crushed it with his heel. He cleared his throat. “Are you hungry?”

There was that gravity, again. Esme knew she should say no, but she thought of all the work she had yet to do, of all the pain they had yet to inflict on each other, of all that inevitability and barrenness, and suddenly she felt in her bones how tired she really was.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“The food at the hotel is decent.”

“All right.”

She dropped her cigarette and began walking again as it smoldered out behind her.

  
  
  


**THEN**

Tommy tried to keep just this side of frantic. He’d waited the whole car ride back to the house, and he considered that a monumental piece of self-restraint, his last of the night. Grace didn’t feel the same way, he knew, because she was saying his name, but the way she kicked her shoes off at the door, he still knew how the night was going to end.

Grace said his name, and he couldn’t stop kissing her. She smelled like shadowed roses, she tasted like champagne-colored dreams, and she felt soft to the touch in ways no memory could capture.  With one hand buried in her hair, Tommy ran one hand down her side, impatient for the conclusion of the conversation.

“Tommy,” she said again, and he leaned his forehead against hers, caught his breath. “Tommy, do you have someone?”

He wore a ring, but it was still an open question, he knew. Her fingertips asked different questions of his skin, and he gave up the dance, rushed to the end.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was going to take this away from him at the very last moment.

“I have a racehorse. She’s going to win the Derby,” he said.

  
  
  


Tommy didn’t need to brace himself on the arm of the sofa, but he did; there was something protective in it, though he didn’t know who he was protecting, or what, or why. The night was his, inviolable. The night was his and also the first time since she had left that he’d kissed a woman like this, hovering above her, whole body alive to the slow exquisite stretch of her around him, to her cool hands against him, to the way her breath stuttered with need. For a moment, all he thought of was how much he wanted to kiss her. Then he did. She smiled against his lips, he could feel it.

He felt that he was where he was supposed to be, like he had rediscovered a path home at long last. His open-eyed midnight dreams had finally come true. He closed his eyes.

  
  
  


Tommy had rushed the night, and now the night was rushing him right back; he had hoped, at least, to lie there a minute and just bury his face in the curve of her neck, but if she was going, she was going.

“When do you sail back?” he said, before she had even finished putting her dress back on, and if that wasn’t giving the game away then he didn’t know what was, but also? Also. He didn’t care. He had barely had anything to drink, but he was intoxicated beyond what he could bear.

Grace avoided his eyes.

“We don't know yet,” she said.

His chest warmed. “When do you go back, Grace?”

“They're doing tests on us,” she said, finally looking at him when he suddenly wanted it least. “I don't know when they'll be finished. We're having treatment with a doctor in Harley Street, some new thing. A breakthrough. We're trying for a baby.”

A baby. A family. He had nothing to curl fists around; his hands hung at his sides, open and empty and useless. Hurt followed fast on the heels of healing, faster than it had done the first time they’d done this, and he knew he had made a mistake, but he’d see it to the end.

“Why did you come here tonight?” he said.

“The doctor believes it's surely me who's at fault,” she murmured.

It was all he could do not to exhale audibly. “I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t sorry at all, but he didn’t like to hear the faint bitterness creeping into her voice. Maybe it had been foolish, but he’d liked to think of her floating through New York, entirely untouched by anything as painful as this.

“It’s no one's fault,” he tried.

“I'm tired of that,” she said, more bitterly than before.

It was the wrong thing to say, but he said it anyway, heart in his throat: “Can I see you again, Grace?” Even to his own ears, he sounded far too soft, nearly tentative.

Grace said nothing, and Tommy reproached himself more viciously than he’d done in months for it. He had known, and he’d failed. He had a plan. He had a _fucking_ plan. He turned it outward as quickly as he could.

“You're used to working under cover, eh?” he drawled, in the right voice, far too late.

She hit him. He should have expected that. Her time in New York had neither dulled her speed nor weakened her arm. His cheek stung and screamed in a way that made him freeze for just a moment, absorbing it.

“I've never lied to him once,” she said with righteous wrath, and it was the first time Tommy felt truly jealous of the man.

“So tell him the truth.”

Grace collected herself, smiled an sardonic little smile. “Is that really what you advise?”

“Yes,” he said steadily.

She looked at him a long moment, challenging, and then she went to go retrieve something from her purse. He couldn’t tell what it was at first, and then he saw the familiar flash of the razor as she flipped it open, then flipped it closed again.

“You said you weren’t armed,” he said, unmoving as she advanced on him.

“You said you had a racehorse.”

Grace opened her fingers, showed him the razor all tucked in safe, and he went motionless. His stomach dropped. That long scratch on the handle was familiar.

After a moment, Tommy tried to reach for it, but she was quicker, snatched it back. He bit down hard on nothing at all.

“Racehorses can’t take the four o’clock train to London,” she said. “Or my hotel elevator, for that matter.”

“What did you say to her?”

Grace tilted her head ever so slightly. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m all right?”

His answer came swiftly: “You are.”

“You’re not worried that your wife threatened me with a razor?”

“No.”

Grace looked back down at it, grasped the handle. “Why not?” Click. She flipped it open. Click, closed again. Click, click, click. “Is it because she doesn’t care that you’re here?”

Whether or not Esme cared was the last thing he wanted to think of. “She’s not like us,” he said. He meant to reassure her, but strangely, he only ended up unsettling himself.

“Then why does she carry this?” said Grace, tilting the handle slightly, watching the blade gleam in the lamplight.

“Everyone in the family is at risk, from the bloodiest soldier all the way down to the Communist brother-in-law. Or have you forgotten?”

Grace looked up at him, blade extended. They were standing closer to each other than he’d realized. “Then she is your family.”

“She’s my wife.”

Click. She closed her left hand around the closed razor, and pressed her right hand against his red cheek in a way that soothed the sting.

“Again,” she said, quietly, “It’s surely me who’s at fault.”

“No. And it never was.” Tommy leaned into her hand. He couldn’t say that he didn’t care if anything was her fault. He couldn’t say that he had spent a frightening amount of time longing for something as simple as her hand on his cheek. He couldn’t say that his one night with her had been the first true feeling he’d felt since the war. He couldn’t say that waking up beside her was first time he’d had some kind of peace and hope for a way out of the ocean of memories, a hope that maybe he could stop treading water and get to dry land. There was nothing he could bear hearing himself say. But he could look at her, and she could read it.

He thought, from the flicker in her eyes, she might kiss him, but instead she swallowed hard and rested her forehead against his. “Thomas Shelby,” she said, warm.

“Grace—” His voice rasped and caught on the silence where her last name should be. He was afraid to say Burgess, because she might correct him, and Macmillan would stick in his throat. Shelby was the only one that would suit, but that was out of the question, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

Grace kissed him and pulled away again so quickly that by the time he pressed forward, his hands were empty again, and she had left him standing there alone in a house far too large for one man.

It wasn’t until half an hour later, when he was undressing for bed, that he found that she’d slipped the closed razor into his pocket.

  
  
  


Tommy woke in a cold sweat, wrestling with unfamiliar sheets. Disappointment hit like a sledgehammer to the ribs, and he was angry, he was angry, _fuck_ he was angry. What had he been thinking? Why had he held some hope that things would be different? It had been one night. What reason did he have to extend one night into a whole lifetime, or even another night, or--

Head in his hands, he tried to breathe deep. No, that was...no, and it...if he...yeah. No. He steadied. it was just the regular brand of fucking awful, and the only reason it stood out to him was because he’d been fool enough to take the bait of hoping hard. It was still 3am and he was still sweating and he was still alone.

At least he knew what to do with these constants, he thought grimly. He picked himself up off the bed and trudged downstairs to make some tea.

  
  
  


**NOW**

“Hello?” said Rupa. Esme smiled. She should have felt guilty, but she couldn’t help it; it was funny to hear her usually pugnacious sister sounding cautious, and at this point in the day, Esme would take all the humor she could get.

“Hi,” Esme said dryly.

“Fuck, it’s you. Are you all right?”

Esme took stock of the situation. She had, in no particular older: decent health, no home, no money, no future outside a hotel room, and Tommy murmuring urgently into another telephone a little further down the hotel hallway.

Given how likely she was to endure sisterly criticism, Esme found it best to be as laconic as possible. She was at the point where she was so tired, she found herself studying the swirling red and gold pattern of the hotel carpet very intently for no fucking reason at all. She was in no shape for a fight.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Good,” Rupa all but sighed.

“Oh, that’s touching. You were worried about me.”

“Worried about you? Sweet, meek, compliant little Esme? Why would I be worried?”

“Ha ha,” Esme said. She could picture her sister cracking into a big, lazy smile.

“I suppose you know Tommy called me,” Rupa said.

“Yeah, that’s how he found me.”

“Shit.”

“Or at least, that’s what had him motivated to ask Delilah about me. Guess I can’t blame you directly. She’s the one that fucking sent him to the restaurant where I worked. Worked, past tense, because of him.”

“Did anyone die?”

“No,” Esme said. “Barely, but no. Though that may change shortly.”

Tommy’s voice had risen, and Esme couldn’t be sure, but she thought he might be arguing with someone on the phone in Romani chib.

“Do you need money for a train ride?”

“No, he’s nothing to flee. How’s your wife?”

Rupa hesitated. “She has a cough, but she’ll get through it.”

“Doesn’t sound like only a cough.”

“No, she’ll be all right. I’m just not used to people calling her my wife.”

“Well, is she, or isn’t she?”

“She is. Thank you.”

Esme went dead silent for a minute, half-enjoying the companionable silence, and half-trying to eavesdrop on Tommy, but after a few seconds, she gave up. Phones were expensive, after all, and she’d be damned if she owed Tommy a cent more than she had to. “What did you tell him, when he called?”

“Everything until the meeting.”

“So he knows about the money, and the Favells, and dad coming to London.”

“Yes,” Rupa said, a little embarrassed. She’d never been any good at lying, so Esme could guess at how badly she’d botched keeping things from Tommy, but Esme wasn’t in the mood to chide her for it just then.

“I don’t think he knows what happened to Dad, though,” Rupa added.

“Good.”

“Can you do me a favor?”

“No,” Esme said immediately.

“I’m rolling my eyes at you. Listen, whatever you do, don’t go to Birmingham.”

“Why?” Esme said, just to be obstinate. She knew perfectly well why.

“Because if you do, you’ll never leave. You said that trying to get away from that family was like water trying to roll uphill.”

“I was drunk.”

“And honest, for once.”

Esme had no immediate retort to that. She stifled a sigh and looked around. Tommy had hung up and wasn’t even trying to pretend all was well; he was leaning against the wall, eyes distant, wearing an expression that made passerby quail. She recognized that look well. If they were at home, he’d sit behind some desk and maintain stillness for half an hour just like that, planning. It was time to go.

“Fine,” Esme said, “I won’t go to Birmingham. Are you satisfied? I wasn’t planning on going anyway.”

“I’m as satisfied as I’ll ever be, though I still don’t see why you won’t leave London now.”

“I need to make sure I’m not tied up in his business. There may be leftovers from Little Italy.”

“The longer you stay, the more tied up you’ll be.”

“We’re talking in circles, and I want my dinner.”

“Never one for manners, were you, little one,” Rupa said, and maybe it was only a background crackle, but Esme thought she caught a hint of fondness there.

“You’re one to talk,” she said.

“Goodnight, Esme.”

“Goodnight.”

Esme hung up, then turned to Tommy, making a sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth that came out as a cross between a tsk and a cluck. In the past, she usually used it to coax horses.

Instead of giving her a dire look, or sniping back, Tommy just withdrew from whatever master plan he was constructing and stared at her unblinkingly. The way his eyes lingered on her face made her feel unsettled.

“Dinner?” she said.

“Yeah.”

  
  
  


It was late, but this was London, so the restaurant was still half-full of well-dressed people. Despite the glitter of the chandeliers, the place felt muted; people seemed to murmur rather than talk, and the tinkling of utensils on plates seemed consciously quieter than they ought to be. Maybe it was all in her head.

As soon as they sat, Esme took a second’s glance at the menu and ordered sweetbreads. There was something comforting about a dish that was essentially butcher’s leftovers, even if on the page it swam in French. Tommy ordered nothing, whereupon she ordered turtle soup on his behalf and dismissed the waiter.

He kept staring in silence, and she was tired of that, so she tilted her chin up and met his gaze. It wasn’t any good, she found after a little while. There was nothing harsh or hard in his eyes, and so the stare-off was nearly one-sided, a far cry from the usual steel on steel. He looked as tired as she felt. He looked like she felt in other ways, too. She gave up. Small talk it was.

“I take it Polly wasn’t happy?” she said.

“She never is, these days.” He leaned back in his chair, but it seemed to be more out of exhaustion than any sense of ease. “She was pleased to hear that I found you, but she’s found something else to fight over.”

“Little Italy?”

He shook his head. “That’s different. The issue with her is that after four fucking years of our involvement in gambling, and not a peep from the Chinese, they’ve suddenly decided that they deserve a cut of the market.”

Esme raised an eyebrow.

Tommy nodded and went on, “They wouldn’t dare that scheme on their own, or at least their current leadership wouldn’t without sufficient some outside factor, so there’s a connection I’m not catching yet. It might be Alfie. He’s been acting up lately. As you might expect, Polly has some thoughts on it, namely that we were fools to stretch into London in the first place, and that we should retreat to higher ground before we get swept away.”

Alfie? Jesus. Esme thought on it. “Camden Town and Chinatown have never been the best of friends, but they haven’t been the worst of enemies, either. It’s not impossible. Would Young Foo Lin be the London middle link?”

“Foo Lin was killed four months ago in prison. Put there for conspiracy to commit treason, some weapons deal with revolutionaries gone sour.”

Esme considered that. “It would still likely be a Young or a Young relative, if London’s Chinatown is in the middle. When it comes to mixing family and business, the Chinese are even worse than we are.”

Tommy acknowledged this with a tilt of the head, and Esme thought she caught the ghost of a smile in his eyes. How easy it was to fall back into all this. She straightened in her chair.

“We shouldn’t talk business,” she said. She liked the way those words sounded, clean and crisp, commanding. “I’m don’t know the players anymore, so I won’t be any help.”

“You could be,” he said quietly.

“We shouldn’t talk business.” Esme wished the food would come; that would be a welcome silence. As it was, the quiet and genteel people around them were not making enough fucking noise to fill the space.

“There is nothing but business,” Tommy said. “Other than family.”

“Is everyone still alive?”

“Yes.”

Esme steeled herself and said it: “Then that’s all I need to know.”

He paused for a long time, collecting himself. She hated that, hated that he had to collect himself in public, because she knew he would speak at once if he could, and. Fuck.

“If we can’t talk business, and we can’t talk family, what do we talk about?” he said.

Although the words were sharp, his voice was nothing but weary. His eyes were soft and she hated this, finding him unexpectedly wavering where she’d expected a solid opponent. Fighting him seemed cruel. But what other choice did she have?

“Maybe we don’t,” she said.

“Why?”

She looked up at him. “I’m not going to Birmingham. I’m only staying long enough to make things right with my Italian landlady and give Delilah a piece of my mind. Then I’m off.”

It was foolish of him to wish that she’d stay, and she had already tried to make that clear, but she could still see a little hope in him die then and there.

“Where will you go?” was all he said.

Esme shook her head. “The telegram system was a mistake. If we hadn’t made that, I would be in Little Italy, you would be in Birmingham, and we’d both be fine.”

A muscle pulsed in his jaw, and she nearly sighed with relief. He had turned the corner, and was heading to where she wanted him, descending into anger.

“You can tell me where you’ll be, even without telegrams. They’re irrelevant to each other,” he said, measured, slow, sardonic. “So at least make a better argument than that, Esme.”

She lifted her chin a fraction. “Why should location matter?”

“It fucking matters. Don’t tell me that comes as a surprise to you.” The rasp in his voice bordered on a growl.

“It does.”

“Why?” he demanded.

Esme gestured at his left hand.

“You know, it doesn’t matter if you’re in an expensive suit with a solid gold pocket watch when you’re still wearing that emblem of bad fucking taste,” she said.

He didn’t understand immediately, and God he must be tired. She must be tired too, because it didn’t make her as angry as she wanted.

She took great care to finish with a voice that was purely contemptuous: “Doesn’t your wife object to you wearing the same ring twice?”

For a moment, they looked at each other across the table, and all other sound seemed to drain away.

“Esme,” Tommy said, and his pale eyes were piercing, voice dead slow in a way that made her suppress a shiver. “You are legally dead. Grace Macmillan is in New York as we speak. I don’t have a wife.”

Esme stared, aghast. There were disastrous possibilities unleashed by this that she couldn’t even begin to process properly. “Then—”

“Pardon me.”

Esme looked up. The maitre’d loomed over the table, mouth in a thin line but bursting with superciliousness all the same.

“Yes?” Tommy didn’t look up. His voice was six shades darker than usual, which should have been sufficient warning. But it wasn’t.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave,” the maitre’d said primly. “There’s been some trouble with your room that we can’t account for.”

“What, exactly?”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have this conversation in my office?” The man looked pointedly at Esme.

“No,” said Tommy flatly. “Go on.”

“Room damage, for one. And there are some irregularities with your payment methods.”

“What irregularities?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say.”

“I could pay in cash,” Tommy said, finally looking up at the maitre’d, eyes blazing in a way that made the exact words he said completely irrelevant.

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t suit, sir.”

Esme almost admired the maitre’d for the brazen calmness of his reply. Almost. But the man wasn’t only unafraid. He was enjoying himself, the bastard. His barely suppressed glee came, no doubt, from some previous feud with the Peakys over some London business, some score finally settled, purely a reasonable reaction to history, and yet she was tired. She certainly wasn’t having a reasonable reaction to some mustachioed prick looking at Tommy with that level of smugness. Her natural instincts told her to stand up and break his nose.

Just then, the waiters arrived with soup and sweetbreads. As the two men stared each other down, Esme figured out more or less how things were going to go. She used her fork and her napkin to make an extremely odd package of sweetbreads with her white cloth napkin, tying it all up like it was a baby bundle.

Tommy didn’t budge. Esme sighed. She figured her ego could take a retreat far better than his, at this point, so she stood, and at this, both men turned to look at her. It gave her a little satisfaction to receive a look of horror from the maitre’d when he saw her napkin bundle, and beyond that, the other guests staring at the spectacle.

“Well?” Esme said.

Tommy rose to his feet, and together they swept past the maitre’d, out towards the hotel’s front door. Without quite looking, she tossed him the keys in a flash of silver that he also caught without quite looking. They left the building shoulder to shoulder.

  
  


“Room damage?” Esme said, once they were safely in the car.

“They made that up. Even the clock was indestructible.”

Esme raised an eyebrow, but as he was driving, he didn’t pick up on it. “I take it that was the London side of your troubles?”

“Unless Polly has done something unspeakably stupid with our accounts.”

“London, then.”

“Mm.”

Tommy working, Tommy detaching, Tommy enraged and all but staggering from sleeplessness—Esme was accustomed to handling all these things. Unfortunately, he also looked as deeply unhappy than as she’d ever seen him, which was difficult to handle, even for her.

Esme felt a flash of regret. Perhaps she’d been too selfishly focused on making sure of her own exit, and pushed for a battle with him when he had no battle to give. She knew how much dignity and distance mattered to him, and yet she could see how badly he was failing at it all, misery clear in the set of his jaw, the dark circles under his eyes.

“Sorry you didn’t get your soup,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, as brief and flat as a machine.

“I know, but I’m sorry.”

“It’s all fine, Esme.”

“No, it’s not.” She said it as gently as she dared.

His true reply was in the slight loosening of his shoulders. He didn’t bother to lie again.

  
  
  


When they arrived at their destination, she was a little surprised at it. To a traveler’s eyes, the neighborhood wasn’t half green enough, but from a London perspective, it was sprawling and verdant with lawns and flowerbeds and the occasional tree. The brick house they had stopped in front of possessed not only a small green lawn in front, but big white sash windows and a neat white trim.

Esme got out of the car and stared up at the house with a dubious expression on her face.

“This is dreadfully respectable,” she said. “It’s not yours, is it?”

Tommy rounded the corner of the car and headed towards the house, beckoning her to follow.

“Technically, it’s Arthur’s,” he said. “Real estate’s a relatively safe way to hold money for us, because it’s one of the least liquid assets out there. One of the most difficult to take away quickly.” He paused at the door to unlock it, then stepped aside to let her enter.

The first thing Esme noticed was the sheer size of the place. “He has a maid, doesn’t he?”

“Full-time.” Tommy locked the door behind them.

“Better find another wedding veil. You know it’s only a matter of time before he goes John on you.”

“He’s already seeing another woman.”

“You’re sure that’s enough to to stop him?”

“Even if it’s not, I doubt she’ll be interested in bearing Arthur children at the ripe age of sixty-two.”

She smiled at that, and he smiled back, deadly weary but good nonetheless.  

After a moment, he said, “I need to call some people.”

Was he asking for permission?

“Yeah,” Esme said.

Tommy disappeared into a back room, presumably Arthur’s study, and Esme, abandoning her sweetbreads package on a side table, amused herself with exploring the house. It was a handsome place, large and tidy beyond all reason. Either the maid had a mania for cleanliness akin to a personal vendetta against dirt and dust, or Arthur didn’t use it. Perhaps both.

Certainly the décor didn’t reflect the Arthur that Esme remembered; the only place he’d had any hand in designing was the Garrison, and that had been all gold, everywhere, verging on the ridiculous. This, instead, was a little old-fashioned but wholly pleasant, from the plush chairs in the sitting room to the massive sink in the kitchen to the floral bedspreads at the foot of every bed in the upstairs bedrooms. Floral bedspreads? Yeah, Arthur hadn’t designed the place at all.

Curious, Esme opened several drawers and doors, only to find mostly empty spaces, perhaps some cleaning materials here and there. In the second bedroom on the right, there were some clothes neatly folded in a chest of drawers, about enough to last Arthur a week. Esme sniffed them. They didn’t smell too badly of mothballs, so that was...what, a month since he’d moved out? Hm.

She investigated the armoire, only to find that it had been turned into an armory. She smiled at the boxes on boxes of ammunition, the one long rifle, the scattered handguns.

“Hello there…”

The Webley Mark IV revolver was the obvious choice, sturdy and familiar, even if it was too long to fit into her biggest pocket. She took it, a corresponding speedloader, a box of bullets, and, after a moment’s thought, a belt and spare shirt as well. Arthur, even sober, had always been one of the most generous Shelbys when he was in a good mood, she reasoned, and she’d been one of his favorites, so it wasn’t likely he’d object. Besides, she had a sense that it would be better to face the future while armed.

She was just about to go back downstairs when something on the bed’s side table caught her eye.

Was that a fucking book?

Esme turned on the lamp so she could inspect it. What she saw was frankly more shocking than a severed ear would have been. Not only was it a book, but it was a book with a black leather cover and a single gold cross embossed squarely in the center of it.

“Arthur Shelby Junior,” she murmured, “this had better be a joke gift.”

But when she lifted the cover, she found actual Bible verses inside.

“Jesus Christ.”

  
  
  


After heading back downstairs, Esme found that the house’s mystery designer had had the foresight to make the door to the study too thick to allow for good eavesdropping. So she retrieved her sweetbreads and headed out the back door to have a look at the backyard.

She expected to find a small patch of grass, maybe a bit of picket fence to delineate ownership, but instead she found a veritable wilderness of flowers in a garden about half as large as the house. It was enclosed by a hedge of false holly, about twelve feet tall, thick as could be and with wickedly sharp-pointed leaves.

Although it clearly hadn’t been tended to in a while and many of the plants were half-yellowed with drought, the garden gave off a delightful sense not of neglect but of abundance, with ivies flowing wild along the side of the house, delicate primroses half-strangled by far hardier, round-leaved weeds, stout bushes of red and pink roses holding their own territory, a few white-flowering trees cradling a defunct fountain, and a lick of purple columbine nearly obscuring a short stone bench. From somewhere off in the west, where the sun was setting, a faint smell of lilac floated to her on the wings of a wind thick with the promise of an imminent rain.

If Esme had believed in enchantment, she’d have believed the spot magic. But as she didn’t, she brushed aside the columbines with an impatient hand, sat down on the stone bench, and unwrapped her package. Sweetbreads hot were not a particularly pretty food, and sweetbreads mildly warm and eaten with fingers only would have been a trial on any other day, but Esme was very hungry, and very tired, and chose in that moment to be happy.  

After she’d finished most of it, a blackbird, drawn by the smell of the food, flew down and perched boldly on the other side of the bench. It cawed at her.

“Hungry?”

It regarded her with those small round eyes, orange beak open.

“Fine.” She bit off a piece and then tossed it to the bird. It blinked.

“Are you—”

The bird took one peck at the piece of food, then hopped back and launched itself into flight, disappearing into the rapidly darkening night sky.

“You fucker,” she said, affronted, just as the back door to the house swung open.

“What’s wrong?” It was Tommy, tenser than ever.

Esme made a gesture of mock frustration. “That blackbird rejected my friendship offering.”

He cracked a half-smile.

“Well? Did you settle your accounts?” she said.

“No, but I’m about to.” He couldn’t even stand still, there was so much suppressed energy in him. Seeing him like that felt the same way the humid air smelled; a storm was coming. She had always hated nothing more than the day before the battle, even in France.

“I’d tell you how and where,” he added, “but I doubt you want to know.”

“You’re right,” she said.

Tommy raised an eyebrow. “Sorry, what was that?”

“Fuck off.”

That smile didn’t last half long enough. “Don’t wait up for me,” he said.

“Don’t die.”

“Yeah.”

As they looked at each other, Esme willed him not to leave, and he didn’t. He lingered there, wavering, the shadows of the trees slanting across his face. Then he started forward.

“Here.” Tommy pressed something smooth and cold and metal into Esme’s hands. She squinted down at it in the poor lighting of dusk, and when that didn’t do enough, she ran her fingers along it.

“I thought I’d return it,” he said. “Better late than never.”

It was her old flip-handled razor.

“You had this?” she said. It wasn’t an accusation. She said it with something like wonder.

The shadows made it hard to piece together his expression.

“Thank you,” she said. “Though if we’re expecting trouble, I hope you don’t mind when I use this instead.” She reached behind her, untucked the Webley from her belt, and showed it to him.

Now he was certainly smiling. “And here I was calling men away from their warm beds to come guard the house, as if you needed saving. Should I tell Wesley and Prescott to head back home now?”

“You should,” she said, “because this is the sleepiest neighborhood I’ve ever seen. But you won’t. I know you.”

For the first time that day, that truth didn’t cut her at all. She knew there were reasons to be afraid of knowing him, but the sunset was nearly gone, the moon shed only a weak and watery light through thick clouds, and something about physical darkness had always made her feel safe. She knew him and was known by him, and that feeling warmed her in ways a fire never could.

“Goodnight,” she said softly.

In lieu of replying, he reached out and cupped her cheek, thumb tracing a slow arc across her skin.

Her breath caught. She knew she should rebuke him, speak, move, do anything, but instead, awshe found herself leaning into the touch as time twisted slow. She slowly inhaled in a way that she felt with her entire chest, and then felt afraid to exhale, as if holding her breath could hold him too.

But it couldn’t. After only a moment, he withdrew.

“Goodnight,” he said, subdued. With that, he turned and walked swiftly back to the house.

When the door closed behind him, Esme let out the breath she’d been holding and had to breathe a little faster to make up for the burning in her lungs. It had all happened so quickly.

She stood and began to pace the length of the garden, suddenly aching to move, move, move, as if his restlessness had infected her, as if she too was off to a fight. Her dress wasn’t enough against the wind, but better the chilly night air than the empty house.

  
  
  


**THEN**

Tommy stayed at the Shelby Limited offices until two in the morning, and he did that for a reason.

Breakfast was a sandwich hastily purchased at the London train station, cold and mostly composed of some questionable meat and stale bread. From the Birmingham station, he’d  taken a cab directly to the offices, closed the door to his office, and thrown himself into paperwork. At some point, Lucy knocked on the door and timidly inquired whether or not he’d like food or, oh, anything—a glass of water maybe?—and Tommy realized it was past sunset.

His assent got him water and a generous cut of cold lamb pie, enough to live on for many hours more, until his eyes felt strange and his throat was dry again and he figured that surely two in the morning had to be late enough for even Esme to have fallen asleep.

He didn’t dread her, exactly; he had nothing to be sorry for, given the noticeable absence of sex in their marriage contract, but it would be better if he talked about it with her tomorrow. In the morning, when she’d slept well and had the daily odds to finish, she tended to be busy and businesslike. It was always at night when he got into trouble with her, always at night when she’d let some emotion slip. Not that he was afraid of her emotion. She had all but thrown May at his head.

She had gone to see Grace beforehand, but that had likely been a suggestion by Polly, something to keep him in check, maybe. To make sure he didn’t do anything foolish, or to make sure Grace hadn’t reunited with Campbell.

That would be easily answered. Grace was only in the city for fertility treatments.

If Wag had anything to say about the matter, Tommy could always use rubbing it in Campbell’s face as an excuse. That was at least adjacent to business. It wasn’t perfect, but he’d worked with far less before.

He blinked at the sheet of numbers in front of him, then picked up his pen and got the fuck on with it.

The only interruption he had to endure was Arthur, swinging in to ask if he wanted to come celebrate Arthur’s release from prison with a drink or six, to which Tommy said no, to which Arthur said John was always at home with the wife and kids and Tommy was always working and Ada was a Communist which made Finn the second-best drinker in the Shelby family, a sad state of affairs, especially since he was still only on beer, to which Tommy told him in no uncertain terms to fuck off. When Arthur slammed the door behind him, Tommy actually sighed a breath of relief. Thank fuck Arthur was already too drunk to read anything on him; there was no telling what uncanny abilities family could have sometimes, especially when he was dead tired.

  
  
  


At exactly two, Tommy hauled himself up out of his chair and let himself go home. He had been expecting for it to feel different, or look different, but the Watery Lane house looked as it always did, a little bare, but ferociously clean. He checked to see that the shop was locked up properly, hung his coat up, glanced around uneasily, and decided: tea. Yes. Tea.

When the kettle whistled, he turned to reach up for the tea tin on the top shelf, caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, and made for the vegetable knife.

“You don’t need that,” said Esme. She came in and leaned against the wall, arms crossed. The kitchen revealed a very rumpled green dress, but a very neat braid. Not a good sign. Her hair rarely stayed neat for long.

He put the knife back and sagged against the kitchen counter, heart still hammering.

“Want some dinner?” she said.

“I had a bite at the Stag, and then went back to work.”

“No, you didn’t,” she said, and contradictions were part of their daily dance, but this was something gone flat with all the play taken out of it. “The Stag was closed today, on account of some trouble with the gas line. Real gas trouble, not an explosion excuse.”

“You have a problem with lying about the Garrison?”

She shot him a dismissive look of disdain, then headed for the icebox.

“You were crossing your arms, Esme.”

“Eat your dinner, Tommy.”

 _Thud_ went the dish on the counter, and a few seconds later, a fork skidded along the counter after it. Any other night, and he’d escalate this immediately to the shouting stage, to get the fight over with, but this time, he wanted to navigate slowly. So he ate.

One mouthful in, and he recognized the flavor. Thick crust and tender meat and strong herbs: lamb pie, exactly the same as what Lucy had given him, so alright. Alright. She’d talked to Lucy, knew what time he’d gotten in, and was likely going—

“I preferred the horse woman,” Esme said.

Tommy looked at her. She looked directly back in a way that made him chew slowly to buy himself time. Or no, not really. He wasn’t buying time to think. He knew that he wasn’t going to lie to his wife; he simply wanted to put the truth off as long as possible.

“Your preference is noted,” he finally said.

“Good, because Lady Carleton is to Grace Macmillan as a cigarette is to a house fire. Women aren’t interchangeable; I know you know that. This woman especially. The whores were acceptable, and she was acceptable, but Grace Macmillan is the farthest woman from acceptable you could find. So of course you seek her out.” Esme’s dark eyes bored into his.

“You know what’s most maddening about it all, Tommy?” she went on. “You’re one of the least stupid people I’ve ever met in your life, and yet you did this, and not on the spur of the fucking moment. You asked to be allowed into the party last Thursday, which means you’d been planning it for ten days at least. Knowing you, it could have been ten months.”

Tommy had been thinking about it for longer than ten months, actually, but better not to say that.

“I thought Wag knew better than to tell tales,” he said.

“It’s no tale. And you should know better than anyone else that blood is thicker than water. I’m a MacDonald on my mother’s side.”

“I know.”

“Then that was particularly foolish of you. Predictably foolish.” Esme didn’t so much as blink. “Maybe you wanted to be caught.”

Tommy stifled the urge to roll his eyes. “That’s not it.”

“No? Then why risk it?”

“One private party is hardly a risk.”

“Wag is family, Tommy, and family news spreads fast. If I hadn’t caught it, he’d have raised the word across the entire Patch, and you’d be working under a silent cloud on the day of your final plan. Whenever that fucking is. When you needed them, they’d be suspect you of disrespecting the alliance, and you’re hardly sweet to work with already. You don’t need that, and I don’t need a civil war.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“It won’t come to that because I told Wag that I already knew about Grace, and that she was merely a ploy to get at Campbell. Do you know, he was actually impressed with us.” Esme smiled a small smile. “A good marriage, he said. Wag always had an eye for practicalities, even when we were kids.”

Tommy couldn’t bear that smile, and it made him angry that he should even care. What promise had he broken, what oath had he betrayed? Nothing. Nothing that they’d ever spoken of to each other.

“A good marriage it is,” he said, moving for the door.

Esme blocked the doorway. “We’re not finished, Tommy.”

“What grounds do you think you have to object, Esme? Keeping in mind that disliking her on Freddie and Ada’s behalf isn’t the same as grounds for objection.”

“It should be. For you, it should be. All that talk of family, every fucking day.”

“Do you have a good argument, or do you not?” he demanded.

“When is she going back to America?”

“Thursday.”

“And why is she here?”

Briefly, wildly, Tommy considered lying, but he knew he hadn’t the time to construct something good enough. “Fertility tests and treatments. Her husband wants a baby.”

Esme paused. “Does she?”

“I don’t fucking know.” Although he did know, and Grace did want a baby, so—

“Neither of them must not want a baby very much.”

“What?”

“She’s been in town all of two weeks, and they’re still doing tests. They can’t possibly leave on Thursday if she’s actually getting fertility treatments; those can last months. So which one was the lie, the departure or the doctors?”

Tommy glared.

“The departure, right.” Esme made a wild gesture of frustration. “Jesus, you’re not even trying to lie to me. You’re not even fucking trying, Tommy. It’s insulting. What grounds do I have to object to Grace when I don’t object to Lady Carleton or anyone else? Why the fuck do I have to say it? You know what the difference is. You’re not going to run off with a whore. You’re not going to run off with a lady. But—”

“I’m not going to run off with Grace, either.”

“You already have. Come on, Tommy, Charlie Chaplin? You could have just kept her at the house.”

“It was a tactical error. I’ve been wanting a distraction for a while. Business has been—”

_“You don’t get to blame this on the fucking business.”_

Esme’s voice fucking _cracked,_ and Tommy’s mind stuttered and stilled. He had been racing ahead, grasping at straws to end the conversation, and somehow missed her eyes going glassy with unshed tears. He noticed it now. He noticed it all now: the clench of her jaw, her fists. He’d known she was angry, but this?

This?

A wave of rage rose up in him, eclipsing everything else. How dare she. How many nights, and how many opportunities, and how many fucking words spoken out loud had he given her? How many times had he tried? She’d closed a thousand open doors on him and he’d never let it hurt him but Jesus Christ, the audacity of her daring to be hurt by him now. After all that.

Tommy took two steps, closed the distance, and they were nearly nose-to-nose as he spoke low and through his teeth.

“You don’t get to care,” he said.

He thought it might be the second time that week that a woman slapped him, but he was wrong. It was worse than that. Esme’s lips pressed together, her chin wavered, and fuck. Fuck. Get it over with, finish it, fucking _win,_ then flee the scene.

He pressed forward, brutal, and she took a single step back.

“How can you say this isn’t business?” he demanded. “Wife is a rank, like general, like lieutenant, like sergeant major, and it’s a rank that gets marching orders; it doesn’t issue them. You don’t know the plan. You don’t even know what day it will happen, for your safety, and for everyone else’s. That is how we work. That is the only way we work. It is a business, Esme, and maybe another wife could understand that, but you can’t even protect your own pockets in the presence of a civilian, so how am I expected to explain to you what’s happening with Campbell and Grace and all the rest? You’re punching above your fucking weight.”

Esme tore her eyes away from his face, saw the razor in his hand, and took it. Leaning over her own hand a little, her thick braid fell forward, shielding part of her face, and at that he felt such a mixed pang of anger that he had to do it and loathing that he’d done it that the urge to flee overwhelmed him. He tried to brush past her, but she stepped into him instead, her shoulder to his chest, and when he stumbled back and looked at her again, her chin was up, hair back, fingers erasing the shining paths tears had left behind.

Her eyes, however, were nothing but cold steel.

  
  
  


“I didn’t say you could go,” she said, and he tried to cut in, but she didn’t allow it. “Enough,” she snapped. “I’ve had enough of the lying, and the bullying, and the pretenses. You’re doing a shit job of it, and I don’t know whether to be grateful for that or insulted, but I know you, Tommy. So it’s useless to try.”

Fuck. Tommy leaned against the kitchen wall, and when he looked at her again, she went on, less sharp, but more steady.

“I have a life here,” she said. “I have friends, family. A trunk full of clothes. A favorite shop to buy vegetables at, and another favorite shop for cheese, a butcher’s. I have working hours, and I have a tin of tea. I have Fridays babysitting for Lizzie. I have Polly’s trust. I have a decent aim now. I have the combination to your safe. Wag told me that Grace accepted the title of Mrs. Shelby, so don’t act as though we can both exist together. I am fighting for my life here, and you’re standing there pretending that nothing is happening.”

As Esme went on, her voice began to take on an edge again, lost the flat steadiness and gained in bite.

“What makes this all the more fucking galling is: I know I’m a good wife. Fucking is the least of it, and I know that. Fucking is nothing compared to going to the Garrison to fish Arthur out, and then driving him home while he’s crying on my shoulder. That happened tonight. That should have been you. But I did it, because I’m your wife, here to cover for when you fall short, which is so fucking often. It’s not bread and butter, it’s how some weeks I only get three nights of good sleep. It’s all the things I know. And although you’ll shout lies to my fucking face, Tommy, I have never lied to you.”

“Yes, you have,” Tommy cut in, clinging fiercely and gratefully to this opportunity to stop her.

Esme thought about it. “When?”

“Dealing with Queen Mary Lee for soldiers from the Black Patch. You didn’t do that because you thought I needed that many, you did it because you were trying to lay the groundwork for a deal. That property is worth more than the entire company right now, and even if the plan works, it’s a dangerously expensive purchase for relatively little strategic value.”

“That property is your fucking home.”

“Don’t. Birmingham is my home. The Black Patch is your home, and you want it for yourself. You’ve always regretted having to flee here, haven’t you. Always felt bad that your honor had been smeared in the sight of the Black Patch by your dad, as if you were responsible for him. If you can save their homes, though, you can ride in and be the hero, right? You’ll have an escape, somewhere else to go—”

“Fuck you, Tommy. You think this is an escape for me? This is for you.”

Esme took a deep breath, gathered herself into something a little calmer. “If you have the deed to that land,” she said, “The Birmingham Romani, the Lees, our family, none of them can ever oppose you. Not even if this marriage ends between us. If you have the deed to that land, then neither of us gets to say that business is an excuse for staying. I want to be your wife, Tommy. I’m fucking good at it, and I’m settled into it, and I—”

She didn’t look at him, but she raised her chin half an inch. “I’m fucking wrong in the head, somehow, because I like being your wife. I do. Sometimes I think I like you…” She moved her head slightly, sharply, like half a second’s worth of shaking her head. She met his eyes. “But I’m going to stay, I want you to look at me and decide whether or not you want to be my husband, and I want you to make that decision ten thousand miles away from the word business.”

It was all Tommy could do to stay standing there as they looked at each other, at first. Then his mind kicked in again, working through another escape.

“You negotiated with Queen Mary Lee before Grace,” he tried. “So this Black Patch plan can’t be a reaction to her.”

“It isn’t,” Esme said evenly. “I’ve been thinking about this for more than a minute now.”

“This?”

“You.”

Esme was still breathing faster than usual from the shouting. Her hair, despite the braid, had somehow managed to burst into its usual mess of stray curls. Her cheeks were entirely dry now, her hands were loose at her sides. And she wasn’t lying.

Tommy’s chest seized, but then she blinked, and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and turned into someone casual, the everyday Esme of boiled eggs and toast.

“I’m going to live with Polly,” she said. “When you’ve made up your mind and you can stand to be honest, you can come talk to me. In the meantime, clean your own dishes and manage your own family. I’ll be at the office and nothing more.”

“You don’t have to go.”

“And yet I’m going.” She turned and headed for the coatrack at the back door, her boots already on, her packed bag already leaning against. He followed her out of the kitchen and watched her button up. He didn’t know why. He was immensely tired.

“One last thing,” she said, slipping her hand into her coat pocket. “I almost forgot. I got you a souvenir.”

It caught the warm light from the kitchen as it arced through the air. When he caught it, it felt cold and angular to the touch; when he looked closely at it, he discovered it was a perfume bottle; and when he smelled it, he found it was Grace’s.

“I admit I don’t know Grace very well; I forgot what color her eyes were, and I mistook her service to the country for a sense of honor, so that’s two strikes against me. Maybe fighting her is punching above my weight class, I don’t know. But I know you, Tommy Shelby, down to the bone, and we’re in the same weight class, you and I.”

She wasn’t wrong. Despite everything, he nearly smiled. He nearly—but what was there to do?

“Goodnight, Esme.”

“Goodnight.”

Bag in hand, she left. He locked the door behind her.

  
  
  


**NOW**

As Esme sat cross-legged in the kitchen, feet tucked under her thighs despite the unyielding wood of the chair underneath, she could no longer feel the night moving around her. Blame it on the clouds. Instead of moving through time with whispers of sweet wind and whining of insistent crickets, the night appeared to be plunging straight down a moonless darkness akin to the bottom of a well. It had not been long since she had last waited for someone to return to her alive, but in the short time since, she’d fallen out of practice. Or maybe she’d never really known how to do this. Certainly she’d drunk more during her Birmingham days than she ever had during her French ones, and that was saying something...

She pressed the bones of her ankles against the wood, latched onto the current of discomfort that came from it, and returned once more to the simplicity of the two actions she’d decided on.

If he did not come back, she would check with whatever Shelbys remained and see if she was held accountable for his death. Frankly, if she was, there was nothing she could do about it. If she was not, she’d finally make the journey to Paris. There was Rupa, and she had always told herself she’d return to France one day.

The danger there was the temptation to join whatever remained of the Shelbys, and punish whoever had killed him. But she knew enough about blood feuds not to succumb. She hoped.

If he did return, there was one anchor she could cling to with both hands: _I’m going to France tomorrow._ Five words, memorized. After much chanting, it sounded like a promise, a prayer, or a threat. As exhausted as he was, as embroiled as he seemed to be in yet another titanic struggle for power, she knew his back would be to the wall and emotions close to the surface. She fully expected her lungs to be worked to full capacity, expected her throat hoarse, expected her memory burdened with fresh fuel for nightmares after shouting her escape.

But she would escape. Again. Thank goodness, whatever goodness remained, for the business, as long as it didn’t kill him. It had given her long enough time to tame her personal Furies again.

As long as it didn’t kill him.

As long as it didn’t kill him.

As long as it didn’t—

A sudden sound interrupted her, a key in the front door. Esme put one hand on the Webley in her lap.

The door opened, and she knew at once it was Tommy by silhouette alone. Then he ventured into the golden ring cast by the kitchen light, dropped into the chair across from her, eased his coat off his shoulders, and:

“You’re bleeding,” she said, half in alarm, and half because she felt she had to tell him, because he might not know; he looked like a horse hit between the ears, barely able to stay upright. And yet he wasn’t bleeding all that much. It was a faint trickle down his side, nothing more.

“It’s stitches reopened,” he murmured, and wasn’t that the goddamned truth. “Is there news?”

“No, nobody called the house.”

“Then why are you up?”

“I made some calls myself.”

“Yeah?” He offered her a cigarette this time, which she declined, before he lit up his own.

It was too late to stop, but she knew she was doing the wrong thing. She had promised herself before he even opened the door that she would say it before she fell asleep, and she could hear herself saying it, and yet she knew that it was the wrong fucking thing.

“I’m going to France tomorrow,” she said.

He swallowed.

“I’ve arranged it all, made all my apologies, even sent a letter off to Delilah. My personal affairs, small as they are, have been finished. You can’t keep me here.”

He exhaled, slowly. “I’m not fucking Bluebeard.”

Jesus, this was too easy. Her skin crawled. “Then...”

“What do you want, Esme?”

“I’m going to France tomorrow.”

“So you said.” His voice was bleak but without reproach, and she could feel her heartbeat in her chest.

“You’re not going to stop me?” she said.

“We’ve been over this. I won’t use force.”

“You’re not going to try?”

Tommy opened his eyes and regarded her wearily.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “I’ve learned some things since the last time we had this conversation.”

They stared at each other through a leaden silence.

“Good,” Esme finally said.

She didn’t mean it. She knew that Tommy didn’t want her to go. A Tommy that didn’t fight for what he wanted was beyond bewildering, someone she didn’t know, someone she didn’t understand, a possibility she had never even considered.

If this was who Tommy was now, then her husband was dead. She didn't know whether to be grateful or not; she didn't know if she was allowed to mourn.

“Is there anything else?” he said, gathering himself up from the chair all the effort of a man twice his age.

Esme realized that he was waiting for permission to go off into some different room to tend to whatever wounds he had. She seen him bleed scores of times before, but she’d always been able to do something about it with her own two hands. That was the second half of the conversation that her unconscious mind had still, somehow, expected.

Her eyes caught on a bruise like a thumbprint going purple on the side of his neck, and that hurt, unexpectedly.

“No, nothing else,” she said.

She fled upstairs without a goodnight, feeling like a thief, like she’d gotten away with something, but there was no triumph in it. No, her whole chest felt like it was hatching a wrong, and she couldn’t even put it down to a hellishly long day with no sleep for her body or rest for her mind. She’d committed plenty of crimes recently, but this was the first time in years that she felt fresh guilt. It had been like shooting a dead body.

Picking a bedroom at random, Esme took off her shoes and burrowed under the sheets. For some time, the relentless quiet of the house and the inexorable warmth of the blankets fought hard with the knowledge that not so far away, he was likely getting the surgical suture out of the kit, likely so tired that his mask fractured when the needle pierced his skin.

Eventually, the quiet and warmth won. Esme fell into a dreamless sleep.

  
  
  


She woke to the sounds of a nightmare, and flung the covers off, swung her legs over the side of the bed, only realized what she was doing where her feet met rug instead of wood floor. In the moment of indecision, the sounds suddenly stopped, and she slid back into bed quickly, irrationally afraid of being caught.

A plank in the hall floor creaked, and from the slight rustle of cloth, the quick breaths he was trying to slow, she could tell that Tommy lingered in the hall outside her door. She couldn’t, she couldn’t, she couldn’t, and just when she thought she might, the plank creaked again and he was walking away.

Damn it.

Esme got up, went to his bedroom just across the hall, and found the bedside lamp still on, but the room empty. He must have gone downstairs, maybe to retrieve some cigarettes from his coat. Crossing the room, she reached to turn off the lamp and then froze. Atop the stack of files by his bed was one that had her name printed clearly front and center on its cover. Something official, by the look of it; maybe even a police file. Sinking onto the bed, she picked it up, opened it, and began to read.

The amount of brutality that could fit in so few pages took her breath away.

  
  
  


Downstairs, all rooms lay dark, but when Esme turned on the kitchen light, she saw the back door sat ajar.

Outside, she saw Tommy standing at one far corner of the garden, a clear black shape against the softer, nebulous forms of bushes moving a little under a thin rain.

She called to him. In the darkness of the far garden, she couldn’t see his hands enough to see whether or not they had been shaking, but she saw him stick his hands in his pockets as soon as he knew she was there, and that was nearly the same thing. He turned towards her.

“Come here,” she said. He hesitated. “Tommy, come here.”

When he walked closer, into the light from the kitchen windows, the reason for his hesitation became clear; he didn’t even try to hide how wretched he was, and it went beyond his the dark circles under his eyes, had sunk into his face, his skin, the look of profound weariness he gave her, as if to say, _what now?_

“I didn’t know,” she said.

Tommy stopped walking and stood there with all the uncomprehending, mute misery of a wounded animal bleeding out.

So Esme went to him. Up close, she could see how the bruises had spread and darkened over the hours of the night, how the dark circles under his eyes nearly looked like bruises themselves.

When she reached for him, she did it slowly, gave him plenty of time to flinch away. That was the first thing she had always had to do when his hands were shaking. But he didn’t try to flee. He stilled when she held his head in her hands, made a cut-off, hurt sound in the back of his throat. His cheeks were cold to the touch.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Tommy shook his head. His lips parted, but instead of speaking, he stepped closer so that their knees knocked. A curl of wind made the corner of his coat lick at her ankles, and she could see his face in unbearable detail, all the way down to a fallen eyelash, the faint flecks in the blue of his eyes, the streak of skin scraped raw by some enemy’s ring.

In the silence, a thousand possible words flashed through her head, none of them enough. But she had to speak. Those eyes—she had to speak.

“I’m here now.”

Tommy nodded and closed his eyes. Putting her arms around him, she gathered him in until his face was buried in her neck, and presently, his arms were around her too. He pressed close.

The rain had paused, however briefly, and there was a thickness to the air that suggested a storm would still come. Riding on the breeze came the fragrance of honeysuckle from the far wall of the garden, faint but full of promise, and all around them her favorite scent rose, the scent of grass welcoming rain after a drought.

Tommy was trembling, and Esme couldn’t tell if that was something he allowed himself to do or something he had no control over. She could feel him falling apart before she could hear it.

She held him tight, and he sobbed. She held him tight, and it felt like a dislocated limb being set right: pain immediate, relief on the way. She held him tight, and the moon slipped behind a cloud, the wind picked up, the cold crept into her bones, but he was close and clutching her fiercely enough to keep her warm, close and quieting slowly, and then quiet, and still she held him, and still, and still.


End file.
